


december sun is setting

by oemori



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Denial of Feelings, Felix survives, Gen, Implied felix/locus - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Panic Attacks, Pining, Pre-Relationship, Weird alien technology, a lot of hurt and no comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-04-21 08:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22056163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oemori/pseuds/oemori
Summary: His last thought before the world fades into nothing is a simple one, tattooed behind his eyelids and bright even amidst the hazy blackout of his mind.Felix will fucking burn Locus alive.
Relationships: Felix | Isaac Gates & Locus | Samuel Ortez, Felix | Isaac Gates & Siris | Mason Wu, Felix | Isaac Gates/Locus | Samuel Ortez
Comments: 11
Kudos: 52





	1. break from the concrete

**Author's Note:**

> _You may tire of me_  
_ As our December sun is setting_  
_'Cause I'm not who I used to be._  
  
\- Brothers on a Hotel Bed, Death Cab for Cutie

Felix wakes up with a deep-set chill in his bones.

The ship is always so fucking cold. Felix habitually needles Locus for all he’s worth, trying to convince him to take a crack at the broken heating system, but it always ends the same way: in failure. Locus gives him that disgruntled, constipated look, shoves past him, and continues on with whatever job he had already become dead set on completing. “That's a waste of time and resources, Felix” or “put on a sweater, Felix” or “do it yourself, Felix.”

Jackass.

So the ship is always cold, and Felix makes it his job to ensure that Locus always has to put up with constant bitching about it. Because it's fucking cold, and any moron with two brain cells to rub together would know that power armor is not the most efficient heating device.

Not that Locus seems to care. He never even has the good conscience to act like he feels bad about it. Not that Felix knows jack about “good conscience,” but it's the thought that counts.

Fucking Christ, it's cold.

Felix tries to blink his eyes open, but everything feels so heavy. It's unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and it would be irritating if he had enough energy to put into emotions right now. But he doesn't; he feels exhausted and like he’s got bruises on his lungs, like every inhale ignites something inside him that flares white-hot before being replaced by a rush of ice. His spine feels like someone keeps lovingly jabbing at the base of it with a cattle prod.

He takes stock. He's used to the cold, but not to the numbness or the fuzzy, disconnected sludge of his thoughts. He can't help but feel like he's forgotten something. Something important. Tip-of-the-tongue type shit.

He's in his armor. Maybe that's it: Felix never falls asleep in his armor.

When he finally pries his eyes open, he has to fight to keep them from snapping shut again. His HUD is awash in glaringly bright, blinking red; he can't remember the last time that it did that (he can, actually, but those memories are so deeply buried that they might as well no longer exist). It makes his heart skip painfully, the breath catching in his throat and ripping a groan from deep within his gut.

Something is wrong. His armor must be damaged. Is the ship under attack? How the hell could Felix sleep through something like that? Why hasn't Locus sounded the alarm?

He tries to push himself up, unease welling in his lungs, but pauses at the bright tumble of pain that scours an ashen pathway through every limb. The sudden agony leaves him shaken, breathless and confused. The give of the floor beneath him is unfamiliar, grainy and shifting beneath his shoulders; far cry from the soft layers of his mattress. He’s flailing against the pain, struggling to see past the cracked redness of his visor and the blinking panic of his HUD. His heart is pounding, and his HUD isn't registering the elevation in BPM. Definitely broken. Shit.

What the fuck is happening? And where the fuck is Locus —

One hand slips out from beneath him and his shoulder smacks back to the ground. The sudden movement seems to shake something loose from his brain, and as he lies there, dazed, memories like firecrackers pop to life in the corners of his mind. Chorus. The Temple, the Purge. The Reds and Blues. Anger, hot in his veins. Panic; a grenade on his shield. And Locus —

Locus.

The name ‘Locus’ and the word ‘betrayal’ mix like oil and water in his thoughts, slipping and separating more and more as he tries to push them together. Refusal to associate. Because how could he? After all they survived, after all that they endured. They need each other. 

“I'm a monster. Just like you.”

Christ. Fucking _Christ_.

He tips his head back and inhales a wet, shuddering breath. Fog gusts around him and weaves through the jungle foliage that cants upwards and hides the sky, concealing the Temple’s peak. His stomach clenches painfully. He shouldn't be alive, not after a fall like that. He's either extremely lucky or the exact opposite. As he squints, coughing heavily into the flashing light of his HUD, he realizes that he's banking on the latter. 

The sky, where it pokes through the leaves above, is a deep, unchanging gray.

Felix swallows, his throat dry and stained with the taste of iron. His jaw is clenched so tight it aches. Deeper still, his chest feels thick, bogged down by something so heavy and discordant that it actually robs him of breath. His eyes burn.

He chalks all these things up to the fall from the Temple, kills the part of himself that suddenly, desperately wishes that he had died from the fall, and throws himself onto the sword that's driven him forward his entire life.

Ashes for ashes. Blood for blood. Revenge is a toxin, rich and sweet. And Felix plans to fucking collect.

The first step is always damage control. He's very much aware of the fact that he has no supplies: no biofoam, no radio, not even a bandaid. And, based on the crunchy, on-fire feeling that he gets every time he tries to move his legs — he can't bring himself to look, they feel so wrong, fire and ice and disconnected from every other part of him — one or all of those things would be very much appreciated.

He lies on his back, fumbling with his visor to try and reactivate the HUD controls, attempting to assess his situation as best he can. The shifty feeling of the ground beneath him is a shallow riverbed; water laps periodically at the edges of his fractured armor, leaking through his bodysuit and adding to the chill of his bones. Something digs uncomfortably into the soft meat of his inner arm every time he twists his fingers. The thick cloud layer decorating the sky blocks out the heat of Chorus’ sun. Suns? He doesn't remember. 

Mother_fucker_. 

His HUD is fractured to all hell. After several drawn-out minutes of frustrated, fumbling tinkering, he gives it up as a bad job and yanks off his helmet. Some fractured part of it catches on the skin of his throat and scores a deep line all the way from his chin up to his forehead — he has a brief moment of regret, followed by pain and a series of hissed curses as blood begins flowing afresh into one of his eyes. He slaps a hand over what part of the laceration he can cover and gets to unbuckling the rest of his armor, sweat gathering beneath his damp bodysuit.

Shit. Is he getting a fever? That is the absolute last thing he needs right now, infection from the jungle stream seeping into his blood through the gouges in his skin. Shit.

He shrugs off the heavy weight of his chest plate andfinally looks down. One of his legs lies at unnatural angle, the other straight but unresponsive as he tries to wiggle his toes. The armor is in the way of any further inspection, but he couldn't be bothered to check for a pulse anyways.

He detaches the remaining armaments that he can afford to lose and tosses them into the river, wincing as every movement jostles his bruised and likely-broken-slash-possibly-even-crushed bones, pointedly not looking at the torn, blood-soaked material of his bodysuit. The heavy pieces float downstream, one after another.

He pauses on his helmet to remove the microchip. The tiny piece of plastic is frail between his shaking fingertips; he stares at it for a moment before shoving it deep into his mouth, wiggling it easily between two of his molars. If he swallows it, so be it; but at least this way he has a chance of keeping track of it.

He tosses the helmet into the river, and is surprised by the lack of anything that he feels as he does it. That armor - that helmet - has been with him for years. Longer than he's known anyone or anything else, really. But as he watches it float downstream, bobbing broken in the choppy, rain-sprinkled waves, he only hopes that it ends up somewhere that no one will ever find it.

Including himself. 

His whole body tenses and relaxes in an instant, an instantaneous flinch that returns him from his drifting thoughts. Something cold and full and unrelated to external temperature streaks down his spine. Adrenaline, maybe, or shock fully setting in; all Felix knows is that he has limited time before the real pain starts. And he's gotta get out of here before it does. 

Felix needs a plan. He needs a plan, he needs a plan, he needs a plan. 

He needs —

_Shit_. 

His heart is pounding wildly, setting him alight with some nervous frantic energy, and before he knows it, he’s dragging himself along the riverside. His legs are screaming in protest and his lungs are full of something like pain, but he moves anyways, no plan in mind but to move until he finds a solution or drops dead.

Blood keeps getting into his eyes. He’s never really been alone before. Not like this. Not ever.

And he realizes, gulping in icy air and dragging himself through silt and his own blood as the sky splits apart and rains, that he's never been so scared in all his life. He may not make it through this. He's running on pure adrenaline and hatred and not much else. He feels hollowed out and insubstantial, the heat of his anger popping bright and dying quickly.

He's terrified.

It's pathetic. Weakness is no place in the life that Felix has crafted for himself. Weakness means mistakes, attachments, failure.

That same weakness manifests in his fists as he claws, desperate and fainting, through the muddy surface of the riverbed as rain blends with the crimson grime that coats his cheeks. Fear is an icicle in his throat, a rush of fullness in his chest, a concoction of fury and pain and something else that he hasn't felt in a long, long time.

The trees are never ending. The river winds and bends. His hands bleed, scratched raw by the increasing rockiness of the riverbed. Thunder calls in the distance and lightning ignites the sky.

And Felix is lost. Literally, because Chorus is a mess of wilderness and broken battlefields, and metaphorically as well. Alone, his purpose is shot. How the hell is he supposed to do his job without a partner?

Without his partner?

His partner.

Rage is a force that energizes his dying limbs. He's needs to find Locus. He's got to see him, to prod him for answers if nothing else. Maybe all of this is some sick joke. Maybe Locus will round the corner with one of those idiot blue’s confetti guns and call his own bluff, and Felix can clock him in the jaw and forget the whole thing ever happened.

_“Sike!” Pop._

Maybe Locus will grovel for forgiveness. Maybe he'll beg Felix to take him back. Maybe he'll try to kill him again. Maybe he'll be too busy kissing Washington to even notice that Felix _isn't even_ fucking _dead_.

For a moment, he imagines Locus’ face, pale and shocked as a bleeding Felix stumbles back into his life. Yeah, how about that. You fucked it up, asshole. Nice try.

Felix digs his fingernails into the ground and drags himself forward. He’s got to find a way out of this mess. Fix his legs, find a ship, maybe get some new armor, and go, go, go.

He's got to get off this planet before someone finishes what Locus started with a clean bullet to Felix’s forehead. The lack of armor should provide at least some autonomy, should he run in to anyone, but that's no guarantee. He has to get off planet. If he has some time, maybe he'll destroy it in his wake. A nice, clean end to this chapter of his life.

That's his first step.

From there, things get pretty straightforward: Felix is going to find Locus. He'll track him to the end of the fucking galaxy. He knows his hideouts, his patterns, his habits, his everything, down to his favorite brand of toothpaste. Felix will find him. And if Locus sticks with the Reds and Blues, all the better. Those idiots know nothing about being discreet. Their trail will practically be a neon streak from planet to planet.

And Felix will kill everyone that Locus loves — Wash, all those stupid sim soldiers, and every single person that tries to get in his goddamn way — and then, he'll make Locus suffer. He'll slice him limb from limb and shred the bloody pieces. He'll disembowel himwith clinical precision and make him beg for mercy. Felix will cut out Locus’ tongue and make Locus eat it while it's still warm and squirming.

Oh, yes. Felix will get his revenge.

But now. Now, fever rages beneath his skin. The muddy riverbank builds up around him, comfortable and softened by the gentle rain. Everything blurs, fog and exhaustion concocting into a white, muted static. He's gone numb.

It's so cold.

His last thought before the world fades into nothing is a simple one, tattooed behind his eyelids and bright even amidst the hazy blackout of his mind.

Felix will fucking burn Locus alive.

—

Felix hates hospitals.

His first experience with hospitals had been at the age of ten; his mother, wasting away and clutching at his hands while his father stared, empty and broken, out the nearby window. Flowers, their smell cloyingly sweet, rotting to nothing on the nearby table. Cancer or bullet holes or overdoses, who cares what killed her. She died anyways.

They're useless memories.

But he still hates hospitals.

The first thing that tips him off is the smell — iodoform and chilly misery — and the second is the sound of beeps, low and consistent and annoyingly shrill. His fingers are icy cold. Something prickles in the back of his hand when he experimentally clenches a fist.

He shifts his arm and it moves easily. He's not tied down. Sweet. Rookie move for whoever the fuck dragged him here, and a bonus for Felix. He won't complain.

Felix blinks his eyes open, trying to focus them on the dim scenery of whatever room he's been dragged into. How the hell did he get here? He feels exhausted, achy and unusually distant, and for the life of him he can't remember anything contextual. His throat feels raw and dry; the machine beeping erratically beside him is definitely a heart monitor.

He blinks, allowing his eyes to adjust to the light. The room sharpens into dimmed shadows and white walls and faint shapes cast by LED screens. The window to his left is curtained. Outside his room, a telephone rings.

It's a hospital, alright. Score one for Felix.

Felix coughs. The hand that lifts to rub at his dry mouth is littered with tubes. He has half a mind to tear them out, but not even drugged-out Felix is a big enough idiot that he'd try ripping out an IV… or four. Seriously, why does he have so many needles in his skin?

Why is he here?

Actually, scratch that. _Where_ is _here_?

He has half a mind to either start screaming or start pulling his IVs out, consequences and blown veins be damned, when the door to his room clicks, hissing sharply as it slides open. It almost sounds like the opening of an airlock. Felix straightens, craning to see who it is entering his space, and is more than a little bit frustrated when he doesn't recognize the woman who opens the door.

“Where the fuck am I?” He says, the words practically falling out of his mouth. He feels jumpy, skin crawling, and his voice sounds strange, scratchy and hollow and quiet. The heart monitor at his bedside steadily picks up the pace.

“No need for alarm,” she says, the door whooshing shut behind her. A clipboard rests in her arms. “You're perfectly safe, I assure you.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Yes, need for alarm!” He snaps. Not his best comeback, but he feels like there's cotton lining the connection between his cerebrum and his mouth. Goddamn, he's tired. “Where the fuck am I?! Who are you?”

“One question at a time,” she says sternly, eyes flashing to his. She scribbles something down on her board before turning to an info station along the far wall. Her fingernails click as she taps something into one of the small, glowing tablets. Felix is too far away to read any of the dim blue screens, but the info listed looks extensive.

Great. Fantastic.

“I understand your confusion,” she says, cutting Felix off as he opens his mouth to protest, “and your frustrations. But kicking up a fuss will only put unnecessary strain on your body. And that is something that you most certainly do not need.”

The woman’s tone leaves no room for arguing, a strange blend of firmness and concern that leaves Felix feeling like he's been scolded. His hands fist a little tighter in the bedsheets. The will to fight smolders beneath his ribs.

“Okay,” he grits from behind clenched teeth. “Okay, fine. Fine. Where am I?”

“We are currently at Doyle General Hospital,” she answers, giving him a little nod as if pleased by his acquiescence. “On planet Chorus. The year is 2560. What do you remember?”

She taps a pen against her clipboard. Felix, on the other hand, freezes. Something about the year ticks off a warning bell, but that particular red flag is clouded over by a different flash of recognition.The name — Doyle, what sad motherfucker does he know named Doyle — sends alarm bells ringing in the back of his mind; his memories remain fuzzy, but after a few stilted moments, the name finally sends a jolt of clarity shooting up his spine.

Donald Doyle. Chorus.

_Shit_.

“Hospital?” He asks, though he's not sure why.

“Yes,” she confirms, and then, for a second time: “What do you remember?”

What does he remember? Out of principle, Felix usually keeps those kinds of details to himself, especially on the rare occasions when faced with nosy medics or hospital staff. How he gets his ass handed to him is no one's goddamn business but his own.

Of course, the whole silent treatment method is soured by the fact that, with a sickening atrophy of the remainder of his confidence, he can't actually remember what happened to him. He remembers Chorus, sure; Chorus and Hargrove and Donald goddamn Doyle, for some reason, are all things that he can dredge up from the recesses of his memories. The rest of it, including how and why he woke up in this hospital, is murky. 

The icy chill of fear rises in his throat. He tries to tamp it down, but he still feels it knocking, impatiently rattling around in the confines of his lungs.

“How did I get here?”

He knows they're his words, but they feel distant, as if someone else spoke them for him. Disconnected.

The woman purses her lips. “I assume you mean the hospital. You were found floating in the Juvo Tributary by a New Republic patrol. Luckily, they had a skilled medic on staff at their nearby base, or you would've bled out. That, or died from infection. Your wounds were… well. I'm sure you know.”

Felix scrunches up his brow. Even through his confusion, that stabbing sense of wrongness persists throughout her explanation. “New Republic?”

“You're obviously a soldier,” she says. “I'm sure you were picked up out of a sense of duty. Towards the end, most of our civil war’s soldiers were mere children in helmets. I'm sure they never considered any option other than helping you, whether or not you were on their side of the conflict.”

Felix opens his mouth and closes it again, lost for words. He doesn't feel bad, per se, but the strange accusatory edge to the woman’s voice makes him feel like he should. She's got the whole “not angry, just disappointed” vibe down to a perfect, wholly unpleasant science.

The woman merely watches him, her expression unreadable. It's almost as if she's giving Felix time to dwell.

Joke’s on her. Even if he did know what the fuck she was intimating, Felix wouldn't know guilt if it stabbed him in the nuts.

“And?” He prompts. It's not like he's about to fall to his knees and tearfully thank some nobodies for saving his skin.

“And,” she looks like she's resisting the urge to roll her eyes, “After the Civil War ended, you were transferred to a central military treatment facility along with every other wounded individual needing further treatment. Eventually, alongside the acquisition of more proper facilities, that MTF became this.”

The timeline makes him pause. Just like that, Felix has another weird feeling, an inkling of suspicion that creeps beneath his tongue and in his gut. He looks around the room for a second time, hands tight on the starched hospital sheets, and when his gaze resettles on the woman, asks, “how long?”

The doctor — nurse? lady — looks at him. Straight at him, her jaw set firmly in a way that reminds him of his mom. Something like reluctance and quiet, controlled irritation at Felix’s lack of cooperation. And holy shit, how fucked up is he that he's thinking about his mom.

“How long have I been here?” He repeats, slowly. She's certainly taking her sweet time to respond, almost as if she's reluctant to.

The unsettled feeling gets worse.

She taps her pen against her clipboard. The cork surface stands out against all the white, clean cut technology, a brown and simple foil for the blue lights of the holo screens.

“Seven months,” she finally says, and Felix’s stomach jumps into his throat.

“_Se_—” he can’t finish the word. It stutters off into a huffed breath. Seven months in a hospital and he remembers none of it.

He licks his lips and tries again, but what comes out is a stunned, “what the fuck.”

“You've been in a medically induced coma,” she begins, launching into her spiel as if speaking quickly will somehow keep Felix from flipping the fuck out, “Cryosleep, essentially. We managed to procure several pods for this site, and you were an ideal test subject.”

Her words are void of emotional attachment, as if Felix’s life means nothing more to her than just that: a disposable, dying body that just happened to be the perfect size for an alien freezing box.

Although, hell, it probably doesn't.

“You were released yesterday. 214 days total.” She clicks her tongue. “Your rehab will be extensive.”

“I didn't consent. There's no way that's legal,” he deadpans, both to hide the panicked beating of his heart and because it just feels right to be difficult.

“There wasn't an alternative option. You would have died otherwise,” she says. Her gaze flickers from his face downwards, and Felix has a sudden fear that his dick went missing in whatever accident was bad enough that it lead him to be frozen for seven fucking months.

He glances down. Wiggles his hips. Still there. Thank fucking Christ.

But then his eyes slide a little farther downwards, and part of his brain just stops. Stutters into nonsense, into that empty, thick confusion that feels as all-encompassing as it does hollowed out.

Felix isn't one to get robbed for words. He monologues through confusion, through shock, through all levels and stages of emotional turmoil; he can filibuster death with it staring him in the face.

But now, staring down at where the sheets lie flat along the bottom of the cot, he comes up empty. His words are missing, just like his legs from mid-thigh downward.

How fucking poetic. 

Felix swallows, and his throat clicks.

“Two-hundred and fourteen days,” he echoes. If his voice is faint, he doesn't notice. He's too busy trying to keep from ripping out one of his many IVs and slicing open his wrists with the sharp edge of the needle.

Instead, he pulls back the blankets and ignores how his hands are less than stable where they fist in the thin cotton material. His upper thighs lie there, pale and dusted with freckles, but where his lower legs used to be are mere stumps: messes of raw, pink skin run through by a network of white spiderweb scars.

His brain isn't sure how to make the connection; he keeps blinking and trying to wiggle his toes. Some stubborn part of him doesn't understand why it isn't working. Another part — a stupid, naive part — is wondering why losing a foot wasn't enough.

_That _fucking_ quarry._

His doctor — nurse? She's got a fucking clipboard — is saying something, but Felix isn't really listening. He catches something about femoral arteries, but his attention is definitely elsewhere. On his legs, mostly. Or lack thereof.

Son of a _bitch_.

“We took the liberty of installing some preliminary nerve connectors,” she’s explaining when Felix finally clocks back in, ignoring his lack of response and bulldozing straight to business. Felix looks up at her, unsure of how he must look; the grimace that she gives him provides him with a good enough guess.

The corners of her eyes are tight.

“For what it's worth —”

Her voice finally loses its blank edge, but that professional detachment is relaxed by an unwelcome edge of gentility that makes Felix bristle. He doesn't want her care, and he sure as hell doesn't want her pity. He lifts a hand — a silent request for something that he isn't sure how to identify yet — so quickly that she blinks, hands poised on her clipboard. As if he could even reach her from his cot across the room.

Looking at her, at the waves of uncertainty that tint her expression, he's suddenly struck with a strange sense of displacement. Images of Chorus — blurred beyond recognition, filled with names and colors and emotional that he can't figure out how to assign labels to — trickle one after another through his stream of conscience. His vision swims in a perfect mirror of his thoughts.

Something inside his chest suddenly buckles.

“Get out.” The words tumble from his mouth, one after another, tripping from his tongue before he even realizes that he's saying them. But they settle easily, a rasp that he means to the core of his being.

The woman sighs, but the set to her shoulders tells Felix that she expected this exact response. With a flick of her finger, she powers down the blue data-cluttered screens that surround her. The woman steps towards the door, boots sturdy against the linoleum floor, but something gives her pause. She stops and glances back at Felix, her eyes narrowed, before looking away to fiddle with something on her clipboard. 

“Before I go,” she says after a pause, shooting Felix a stern look that just keeps him from flipping his shit at how long it's taking her to leave him alone, “I found this before we put you under.”

She steps towards him, cautious as if expecting him to lunge, and sets something down onto his bedside table. The ID card clipped to her scrubs reads ‘Dr. Philips.’

“I'm the only one who knows about it,” she explains, and pulls her hand away to reveal a tiny microchip encased in a plastic bag. Innocuous, sure, but Felix recognizes it immediately; if his heart was pounding before, it's racing now.

His HUD data.

“I —” he tries, but his voice breaks. He can't tear his eyes away from the chip.

“If you're truly struggling to remember,” she says, and taps a finger against the table, “start here.”

She's gone before Felix can speak again. He picks up the chip as if it's made from spun glass and holds it in the palm of one hand, turning it this way and that to inspect it. It looks unharmed and untouched.

It looks — feels — like the only good thing that's happened to him in a long, long time.

He glances down at his legs, pondering, and then back at the chip, and realizes that she gave him nothing to watch it on.

“Goddamn it.”

—

Five hours, several cups of water, and one borrowed holo pad later, Felix uploads the files from his HUD chip and flips through them, one after another. What he finds is interesting, but more or less irrelevant: records of his vitals, scores of personal notes, even one buried grocery list labeled with a date from over six years ago. It's the HUD cam that interests him, along with finding out whatever the hell left him dying in a ditch in the jungles of Chorus.

Another four hours and two more cups of water later, Felix stares at the paused image on the screen — of the temple, of Locus standing amidst the Reds and Blues, of choosing a side that isn't his partner’s — and wonders where the hell everything went so wrong.

—

Dr. Philips and her clipboard return early the next morning. The sunlight is pale and post-rain soft where it filters through the curtains, and nothing can clear out the gloom that's settled over Felix and his abode. But he’s finally starting to feel more like himself, misery be damned, and he sits up a little straighter the second that the door slips open.

“Done already?” Philips asks, brow raising pointedly in the direction of the loaned holo pad where it sits, face down, on Felix’s nightstand.

“Died on me,” he gripes, picking the pad up just to have something to hold. He flips it upside down and rubs a finger over the microchip port. “The core processor in this model’s old as hell, by the way. And the logic board is on its last legs; must have been dropped in water at some point. Did you mean to give me a shitty holo pad, or is this whole hospital just outfitted with gear from 2400? If it is, that shoots my confidence in your professional competence right in the ass.” He leans back against his pillows and sighs, low and raspy. “Good _God_. This place is going to give me tetanus. I need to start writing my eulogy.”

Dr. Philips’ eyes narrow. “You talk too much.”

“And the sky is blue,” Felix retorts. “Didn't you watch my HUD footage? You should know how much I enjoy the sound of my own voice.”

“Unfortunately, yes,” she grumbles, settling her clipboard in the crook of her arm to fiddle with one of his IV bags. “I suppose I do. _Intimately_.”

She says the last word as if it's a living thing that she's desperate to be rid of. Like a cockroach. Or a handsome, legless mercenary that killed half her planet.

“Woah there,” Felix gripes. He settles the pad in his lap in favor of leaning back against his pillows. He leers up at the good doctor as she changes out the drip. “Buy me dinner first, would you? I'm partial to caviar.”

“Speaking of food,” she says, securing the full bag to its hanger, “Do you plan to eat anything along with the copious amounts of water you requested last night?”

“I'll eat when I'm dead.”

She rolls her eyes. “Apparently.”

Dr. Philips finishes checking Felix’s immediate surroundings and heads over to a whitewashed cupboard on the other side of the room. Felix stares at the rumpled blue fabric of her scrubs and finds himself wishing it were gray and green armor instead.

He shakes his head and shuts his eyes against the unwelcome wave of longing that crests, warm and uncomfortable, in his throat. Felix doesn't _pine_, especially not for some backstabbing asshole who deserves nothing more than a bullet in his head. He stares down at his hands, following his freckles up to the purple lines that trail along a vein on the inside of his left elbow, and wishes for something he doesn't know how to name.

Something smacks into the side of his head.

“_Ow_, shit!” Felix yelps, flailing a bit as he grabs the offending item out from where it dropped onto the mess of his bedsheets. “What — is this — is this a jello cup?”

“Here's this, too.” Dr. Philips drops a long power cord into his lap. It curls like a snake between the twin stumps of his legs. He's a little surprised by how close she got without him noticing.

Philips points to the cup. “Eat that.”

“With what?” Felix stares at her. “My hands?”

“You've still got both of those, don’t you?” Felix stares at her, mouth slightly agape from pure disbelief. She shrugs her shoulders. “Use them.”

“Wow,” Felix drawls, “that hurts. I'm hurt, honestly. Look into my eyes. I think I might cry. Are you sure you're a doctor? That was a low blow.” He keeps talking just to see how low her eyebrows can drop. That, and because the familiarity of bothering the shit out of someone results in a nice little curl of satisfaction in his gut. “Well, actually, maybe not _low_, since I don't really have anything to take low blows anymore, do I? More of a mid-blow. Straight to the pelvis.”

“Do you ever shut up?” She growls, treading back over to the cabinets.

“I guess I wouldn't mind any kind of blow at this point. Can't be picky. Not that I ever was, to be honest,” Felix continues, a dark part of him twisting in glee. It's comforting to know that spending six — _seven_ —months in cryosleep hasn't stolen away his charm. “Actually, a blow to the pelvis is probably my favorite kind of blow. Fire away, doc.”

When she returns to his bedside table a moment later, she's holding something small and white in her hands. She stops in front of Felix and looks like she wants to say something, anger and frustration clear in the set of her brow. He waits for her to react — to throw whatever it is at him or at some unfortunate wall, or to maybe stab it into Felix’s bicep. All reasonable, all likely. It's a roulette of options, really.

Whenever Locus used to want Felix to shut up, he would growl meaningless threats under his breath and act pissy during downtime. Relatively harmless. But _damn_ if the man couldn't hold a grudge. He had the singular skill of driving Felix stir crazy with the lack of responses to his rants; out of all the people in the universe, it seemed that Locus’s voice was the only sound Felix ever decided he liked better than his own.

Sure, Locus would snap sometimes. Felix would say something over the line that he didn't always mean, and Locus would react physically. He'd shove Felix into the closest solid object or point a gun at his head or choke him until Felix’s voice was hoarse for days afterwards. But for the most part, the silence was his weapon of choice. It certainly worked; besides, physical violence only ever served to stir up the agitation in Felix, not tame it.

Locus could break Felix faster than he would ever admit aloud, and it used to scare him more than anything else. Part of him thinks that that's why things became so twisted; the only thing that Felix hates more than fear is silence. He’d do near anything to keep both at bay.

Maybe he just hadn't been as careful in doing so as he'd thought.

He watches Dr. Philips, tamping down the urge to brace against the blow that he knows must be coming. He'd had Locus’s reactions plotted to a T; the singleminded way that Locus planned out missions was the way that Felix studied his partner. A twitch in his left brow used to mean he had a stress headache; if the twitch was around his eye, the headache was from exhaustion. Before Locus threw a punch, he used to squint and minutely roll his shoulder. When he was pleased, he used to lift his chin just a bit and crinkle the corners of his eyes.

Felix doesn't know Dr. Philips, but he knows better than anyone else what thinly-concealed anger looks like.

But instead of what Felix expects — instead of hitting him, or throwing something, or storming out — she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

Felix watches her, confused. He feels thrown off center and wishes she would just yell or something. “The fuck are you doing?”

When she opens her eyes a second later, the anger is gone. Her brow is smooth, and her expression is clear and calm. It's worse than if she had socked him, because Felix can't seem to fucking get his feet under him. Every time something feels remotely familiar, the rug gets yanked out from under him and he crashes back into confusion.

She holds out the object in her hand and Felix hesitantly takes it; it's a plastic spoon.

Felix watches her, stupefied. He doesn't react when she leans towards him and takes the jello cup from his lap. With a practiced ease, she pops it open; the green contents are neon-bright. She hands it back.

“Eat, Felix.”

Hearing his name aloud throws him even more. He feels completely lost. Is this Chorus, or some alien look-alike determined to torture him with bewilderment until his ultimate untimely end?

Felix needs a drink. Or two. Possibly even three.

He sticks the utensil into the jello cup and stirs it slowly, breaking the gelatinous cube into smaller, squishy pieces. When he finally spoons a bit into his mouth, he grimaces. Green apple.

“Couldn't find a cherry one, huh?” He jokes, smacking his lips to try and rid his tongue of the aftertaste. Dr. Philips doesn't so much as twitch. Still straight-backed and collected, she watches him cooly, hands in her pockets, until he feels downright shamed into eating another spoonful.

Still gross.

He eats another.

“Cherry flavor,” she finally says, “is for patients who aren't galactic criminals.”

Felix coughs, just barely managing to swallow down the jello in his mouth rather than spitting it out. The action is almost like a laugh startled straight from his lungs; it burns.

“Wow,” he’s almost smiling as he stirs his jello some more.He's reaching the end of it, thank God. The clear plastic bottom sticks out from beneath the green, gelatinous slime.

He takes another bite. It's just big enough that it muffles his next words. He looks up at Dr. Philips and waggles his brows. “_Galactic_ _criminal_, huh? Pretty romantic.”

“Would you rather I called you a murderer?”

Her voice is ice cold, slicing straight through whatever haze of amusement Felix had been clinging to. He can feel the teasing grin drip from his face in one smooth movement. The plastic spoon creaks between his fingers. He wants to respond, to deny or deflect or something that he used to do so naturally, but another part of him is both lost and curious.

Curious to know what she knows. Curious to know what she thinks of him. Curious to see if she'll do something about it.

He doesn't know why. He just is. So he doesn't even try to stop her when she opens her mouth to speak again.

“You killed so many of Chorus’ people. _Good_ people, and some of them — _many_ of them, by the end — barely more than children.” She narrows her eyes, expression critical as her gaze slips up and down Felix’s face. His lack of reaction seems to piss her off. “Did you feel anything as you watched them crumble for your worthless cause? As you watched them struggle for years against strings that you tied to them with your own blood-soaked hands?”

Felix doesn't feel guilty. He doesn't, really — he'd known what he was doing every moment that he had worked to execute their meticulous plan. He wasn't in some false throe, he wasn't being fooled. He'd enjoyed manipulating those people. He'd enjoyed killing them. He still wishes that he and Locus had succeeded; he doesn't give a damn about the well-being of Chorus. If someone were to walk in and hand him the Purge , he'd blow it all to hell without a second thought.

But her words still make some part of him burn. In anger or something else, he can't quite figure out.

But he still burns.

She tilts her head, almost as if sensing the thoughts racing through Felix’s head. His glare does nothing to shake her; if anything, she seems bolstered, her voice even and unbreaking as some central part of Felix slowly begins to corrode.

“Perhaps I should call you a mercenary? Since that seems to be the title that you so prefer.”

It stings, hearing it from her mouth. As if it's something dirty and shameful. He used to be so proud of the title. The fact that he feels _anything_ from her words is a red flag. His walls have been stripped to bare bone _nothing_ if some doctor is successfully lecturing him.

_Fuck_. He's just so tired.

“Fuck off,” he mutters.

Her gaze is so sharp that it seems to solidify in Felix’s lungs. “If you ask me, _Felix_,” she says, and pure malice drips from her lips, from the snarl of her mouth, “I think that the word _monster_ truly is the most apt description for what you happen to be.”

_I'm a monster. Just like _you_._

Felix’s whole body tenses, adrenaline rushing from his throat to his fingertips until his whole body feels like it's on fire. Fight or flight, except flight is immediately torn apart by the acid in his underworked muscles that are screaming at him to fight. His hands ache to tear Philips’ throat into ribbons. His jaw burns from how tightly his teeth are clenched.

He's not sure why he doesn't do it, why he doesn't just grab her and wring her unblemished neck until he has fresh bloodstains beneath his fingernails. She's within arms reach. It would be so _easy_. He's done the same for less.

But a part of him just isn't into it. His chest feels a hell of a lot emptier than it used to feel whenever someone unimportant made the stupid mistake of insulting him. It's like someone scraped away the tissues that used to make him feel whole, that used to make pleasurable, bolstering fury bloom in his chest whenever he was faced with dissent.

But his confidence — if you can even call it that — is gone. There's just… not much left. No familiar rush of heat, no starburst pop of bloodlust between his lungs. His hands twitch and clench around the jello cup still clasped between them, but without a fiery thickness of hatred in his lungs to burn as collateral, they lie motionless in his lap.

Stuck. In limbo.

He feels so wrong.

Felix tips his head back and closes his eyes, swallowing against a sudden thickness in his throat. This isn't him. This isn't Felix. Felix is anger and vengeance and cold, unadulterated cruelty wrapped up in one comfortable, ruthless package. Felix doesn't hesitate when it comes to making sure those who talk shit never get the chance to talk again. He's got a skin that's hard as steel and conductive as copper.

Six months in cryo has made him soft.

Sorry, _seven_ months. Christ. Soft _and_ stupid.

He doesn't want to think about what any of that means for him.

At least one thing is familiar; the lack of desire to pursue something that disinterests him. He changes the subject with an ease that feels good to recover.

“You watched all the footage, then. On my HUD.” Felix heaves a sigh. “All of daddy’s dirty laundry.”

Philips tsk’s. “I know who you are, if that's what you're asking.”

Felix opens his eyes just so that Dr. Philips can see him roll them.

“And?” He asks.

“And what?”

Felix rolls his eyes again. A part of him rejoices when Dr. Philips’s left eye twitches minutely. “If you know who I am,” he drawls, nice and slow, “then why haven't you killed me yet?”

“I meant what I said yesterday. You were a valuable test subject for the cryo pods. Calibrating alien tech can be tricky; humans don't always react well to them.”

Felix nods. “And you didn't care whether I lived or died.”

Her mouth quirks into an almost-smile. “Precisely.”

“I appreciate the honesty, doc.”

Dr. Philips shrugs. “I don't care enough about your wellbeing to lie to you.”

Felix clutches his chest as if wounded by the curt tone of her voice. She ignores him in favor of reading some scrolling line of text on a nearby beeping monitor.

Felix drops his hand into his lap and stares up at her, casually trying to draw her attention. “So…. While we’re on the topic of honesty…”

“I don't know where Locus is,” she deadpans without a wayward glance.

Hearing his name aloud, even if it's just his moniker, stings like someone just slipped a knife into his gut. It's like the fact that someone other than Felix acknowledged his existence makes the whole situation all the more real. More tangible. It's harder to deny spoken word than it is to deny foggy memories and fractured emotions.

Locus left him to die.

_I saw shit straight out of my nightmares._

“I don't give a damn. I'm more concerned with _me_, if you don't mind. You know. The one in a shitty hospital missing his legs.”

He wiggles his stumps and her gaze flickers down to them.

Dr. Philips blinks and looks back up at Felix, brow creased as if she doesn't totally believe him. There's an air of suspicion between them that travels both ways. “Okay, well. What do you want to know?”

“Let's start with the most basic question, shall we?” Felix leans towards her. “What do you want from me?”

She has the audacity to look scandalized. “What?”

“Oh, come on, doc. I've been in this business a long time; no one saves the ass of their enemy without some ulterior motive. And don't,” he says, cutting her off as she tries to retort, “give me more bullshit about being a _good test subject_ or whatever. I’m sure you had plenty of fodder for that particular line of testing. The only reason why I'm not six feet under is because you want something from me.”

“I don't want _anything_ from you,” she snaps.

Felix throws up his hands. “The fuck do I look like to you? Someone that would believe that bullshit? You've had a gun in your pocket since day fucking two-fourteen! Normal _fucking_ doctors with normal _fucking_ motives don't walk around packing _fucking_ heat!”

She's standing still, wide eyed and gaping at Felix’s accusation. Her right hand twitches minutely the moment he references the stupid little peashooter she's got tucked in a holster beneath her scrubs, almost as if she's resisting the urge to grab it.

“Felix,” she warns, and for some reason the sound of that name on her tongue sends him reeling. He sees red.

“Try it!” He snaps. “Just make sure you aim correctly! Wouldn't want you to miss my forehead and shoot one of my legs off! Oh, wait —”

“Felix!”

“I don't _have any!_”

“Felix! Shut up!”

“Don't _fucking call me that_!”

Instinctively, he lunges for her. She flinches backwards, but Felix is faster. His fingers catch her, outstretched and iron-wrought where they fist in the collar of her shirt. He drags her close, intent on — he's not sure, but giving her a black eye sounds pretty good right about now — but freezes at the feeling of cold metal pressed against his chin.

Her stupid little gun, pressed intimately against his throat.

“_F_— let me go,” she says, the safety audibly clicking off.

Felix desperately wants to challenge her, to tell her to pull the trigger. It's partly because he's genuinely curious if she even could, and partly because he's quickly becoming sick of all the turmoil roiling in his gut. Being six feet under doesn't sound so bad right about now — at least he'll have feet in _some_ capacity. That, and he won't have the oncoming dread of life re-evaluation looming over him.

But there's a small part of him that knows confidently that she would do it, and that same part clings to his remaining sense of self preservation like a vice.

He's got unfinished business. He can't die at the hand of some nobody.

Not yet, anyways.

He releases her and she stumbles backwards, trying and failing to look composed as she straightens up and swipes a hand over the wrinkles that Felix’s grip left in her scrubs. She keeps her gun leveled on him; her hand is trembling, but her eyes hold no hesitation. Felix looks away in favor of staring at his own hands.

Motionless.

When she finally lifts her shirt and holsters her gun, the break in the stillness is a welcome reprieve. When she speaks, she sounds exhausted.

“I want you to leave Chorus.”

Felix blinks. “What?”

“That's what I want,” she says, and when he looks up at her, she merely shrugs. “I want you to leave, and I want you to never come back.”

“That's not really what I meant by wanting something,” he says, watching her closely as she bends to pick up her clipboard from where it rests on the floor. He has a distant flash of her dropping it earlier in her haste to draw her gun.

She dusts the surface of it off and tucks it beneath her arm. It settles over where the gun rests, almost as if she's still trying to hide it. As if she's ashamed. But when he meets her gaze, looking for truth, for answers behind her actions and her simple request, she simply shrugs again, resigned.

“I want a lot of things that you can't give me. Never seeing you again is the next best thing.”

Felix has just about had enough of this place, so he's not about to argue. Leaving Chorus would be a breath of fucking fresh air; and if this lady will help him do it, he’s not about to complain.

“That's fair,” Felix shrugs. “I guess.”

—

The surprises follow one after another.

Case in point: Felix gets a leg back.

Felix supposes that he should be.... well, _grateful_ doesn’t seem the right word, and he definitely doesn’t feel anything even remotely in the same realm as gratitude, but... something along those lines. He actually feels a bit vindicated when he wakes up with a limb reattached, wrapped up in gauze like the world’s sickest present. And then angry, because _what the actual fuck_.

Dr. Philips explains, in that too-cool voice of hers, that he’s a subject for this test as well — whether he can survive a replantation of a long-removed limb. They had to take it off, she assures him, or he would have bled out. There’s no reason to be so angry — they fixed it, and he can have it back, and he’s not rejecting _yet_, so what’s the fuss?

Felix throws his pillow at her and tells her, in layman’s terms, to get out before he snaps her neck.

Later, lying in bed, he reflects on the carefully stated yet, and is filled with dread by the prospect that he knows more about limb replantation than his doctors, because a replanted limb shouldn’t reject, not like a transplanted one, unless it’s dead and simply refuses to reconnect, in which case Felix has been attached to a dead limb and is in danger of sepsis, and_ Christ_ Felix needs to get out of his hospital bed before he loses his goddamn mind.

Whatever, he eventually decides, fuming into a pudding cup and staring morosely at the wall; at least if he dies he’ll die with a leg.

He does ask if the other will follow in a similar manner. He gets bad news, of course. The other leg, a nurse explains as she draws several small vials of blood from the crook of his arm, was totally mangled; practically inseparable from the plates of his armor. Very gory, she assures him, when Felix asks if his pulverized leg at least looked cool. Very _abstract_.

_Very poetic_, Felix thinks. He finds that he respects her artistic sensibilities.

He begrudgingly does not slam the nurse’s head into the nearby nightstand when she blows a vein in his inner elbow and adds yet another bruise to the menagerie already clustered up his arm.

—

The nurses take off his bandages a week later. His old — new? Christ, _whatever_ — leg looks freakish. Pale and mangled, the puckered scars that rise from where they repaired his ruptured, well, _everything_, make the limb uneven and achy. It hurts, way more than the opposing stump does; but it’s his, goddamn it. He grew it and he’ll keep it for as long as he can.

They rebandage it, and at least he doesn’t have to look at it anymore.

The other leg — it’s a stump, who the hell is he kidding — looks like someone slapped some rusty plate metal on it and called it a day. It’s uneven and freakish. It kinda matches the other leg, Felix guesses, and the thought makes him laugh for the first time in a long while, because at least this way his legs can be freakish together.

Which brings him to surprise number two.

“Right,” Philips says, standing a safe distance back from Felix’s bed with an armed guard at her side; a precaution she’s taken ever since Felix decided that he was getting sick of being used as a science project. She has that stupid clipboard, and she’s crinkling the corner of a page between her thumb and forefinger. She actually seems nervous, almost a little bit guilty. It's a good look on her.

“Well,” she says, “unfortunately we don't have any prosthetic professionals on staff, but we've got a doctor with professional experience in nerve hookups and artificial joints—”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Felix says, bewildered. “You’re kidding. You’re gonna make me hobble out of here on crutches? Seriously?”

“And that doctor is the one,” she snaps, glaring at Felix as if daring him to interrupt again. She points her clipboard at him as if she could shoot him with it. “Who installed the joint on your leg. Pro bono, you selfish bastard.”

The armored prick standing behind her coughs into his fist, obviously smothering a laugh.

“Whatever.” Felix deadpans. “Do you have a leg for me, or what?”

He waves a hand, allowing it to complete the thought for him. He pointedly does not mention the fact that the metal part of his leg looks like it was reconstructed by a toddler. _Professional experience_ his bedridden ass.

“Yes,” Philips says through clenched teeth, tucking her clipboard under her arm. “We have a leg for you,”

“Cool,” Felix says. “Am I getting some more weird alien tech? I honestly wouldn’t mind that. Like, _fuck_ cryo, but, you know. I’ve got low standards. I’d bet money that it’s shitty, though. Like some leg you pulled off a corpse; that seems more within your budget.”

Philips sneers.

“Reduce, reuse, recycle,” she says, and the man standing beside her holds up the shittiest, most rusty, most _blood-stained_ metal leg that Felix has ever seen.

“God, I hate you,” Felix mutters.

—

His new leg fucking sucks.

Relearning to walk, Felix decides, unsteady on his feet as he grips the bars beside his hips, also fucking sucks.

He’s alone in the rehab center, which seems pretty unprofessional, but, hey, it’s not like he could run out of there anyways. Besides, the peace and quiet is nice. Felix thinks he’d lose it if some nurse was cooing encouragements at him as he shuffled gracelessly across the floor.

The whole situation is infuriating. His new leg is shaky and messily resized; it clunks with every step and still has spots of grime between the seams of the outer playing. It’s an effort to lift it, and an effort to put it down again. His other leg also hurts like a son of a bitch, alternating between totally numb and full of pins and needles.

So, in essence, Felix is really starting to think that he’s truly and totally fucked.

Later, when he falls and can’t get back up again, fingernails gouging at the linoleum as he stares at the ceiling and sees not sterile white, but a jungle temple stretching tall above him, the idea is pretty much solidified. He thinks he’s having a heart attack, can practically _feel_ the warm sensation of blood as it slowly leaks from his chest. He’s dying. He can’t feel his fingers.

Later, when a nurse returns to find him wheezing and hoarse, and when more help arrives to peel Felix off of the floor and stick another needle into his arm, he feels like he’s died and then been dragged out of hell by his goddamn throat.

Later, buzzed and exhausted, he hacks his file with his holo pad and finds an unfamiliar record of sedation treatments.

And that is when Felix learns what diagnosis code F40.0 means.

—

It’s a long process, but Felix learns to walk again. The moment he’s able to cross the halls without wheezing or crumbling to his knees, his flesh leg finally reattached enough to feel more than pain and patchy numbness, Phillips begins prepping him for discharge. She doesn’t want him there any longer than necessary, and Felix doesn’t want to be there any longer than necessary.

For once, they agree on something. It’s almost nice.

“You and me, babe,” Felix says one evening as she lists off the equipment that has been squared away for his planetary departure. All second-hand, of course; nothing that will be missed, and nothing that has any real value. “We’ve got a connection. I feel it in my bones.”

Phillips sneers at him like he’s something that’s crawled in from the sewers. In all fairness, Felix can’t remember the last time he took a shower.

“That’s the blood thinner,” she says, and returns to her list. 

“It’s the benzos,” she says another time, when Felix prods her with more barbed retorts disguised as flirting. Always so matter of fact, her sharp eyes quick to examine the exhausted, worn-thin slump of Felix in his shitty hospital bed before marking something down on her clipboard. “Did you have another panic attack today?”

She cuts to the heart of his posturing with an accuracy that both bothers the absolute shit out of him and fills him with the most confusing sort of nostalgia. It pisses him off and makes his chest ache. Felix finds he wants to bite her in the least sexiest way possible.

As it is, she’s his sole ticket off of Chorus, so he figures he has to play nice until then.

The ship that Phillips’ little team procures is insultingly bad, and what’s sad is that no one seems to realize just how shit it is. The Chorus mechanic that leads them into the hospital hanger gestures to it with an almost proud sort of flourish. Even Philips seems impressed.

It looks like an unholy amalgamation of scrap metal and pipe dreams. It looks like someone took a pelican, smashed it into pieces, and then threw the pieces away and tried to recreate the carnage with dumpster scraps. To call it ‘ugly’ would be a kindness. Screw burning up in orbit: Felix doesn’t know how the damn thing will get off of the ground without imploding.

But he’s being — well, he’s not being _nice_, per say, but he’s trying to not complain too terribly much about the whole thing. He still wouldn’t put it past Philips to whip out a pistol and put a bullet in his brain if he becomes too much trouble.

So, instead of telling the mechanic that the ship looks like hot rusty garbage, he bites his tongue and chokes out an insincere, “It’s..... it’s a ship. Cool.”

The mechanic actually looks pleased at that, which probably isn’t a good sign, but whatever. Everyone on Chorus is a hack, apparently. Felix is really starting to get used to it.

—

Two days before his scheduled discharge, Felix gets a visitor.

It’s late as hell when it happens, and Felix’s eyes are burning in the dim light of his room. He’s eating a pudding cup, scouting out points on a low poly galactic map as he tries to remember the locations of his safe houses, when, without preamble, the door to his room slips open.

“It’s me,” the familiar voice of Dr. Philips says before Felix can move to throw something at his unexpected intruder. He does jostle his pudding cup though, and the spoon drops from his hand and smears chocolate-tasting goo all over his sheets.

“Fuck,” Felix mutters, snatching up the plastic utensil before it can do any more damage. The glare he levels Philips with feels sharp enough to peel paint. “_What?_”

Philips moves about the room, saying nothing and looking as if she’s trying to find some reason to be there.Felix rolls his eyes, glancing pointedly at the analog clock that sits on his shitty excuse of a nightstand.

“It’s 3 AM,” he complains, tossing the (mostly empty, anyways) pudding cup onto the floor. “Why —“

“You know there’s maps saved to your HUD,” Philips says, glancing at the map projected from the pad sitting in his lap. Felix defensively powers down the screen; the faux galaxy blinks off.

“Maybe I like to test my memory every once in a while,” he says. “Make sure your shitty hospital didn’t give me brain damage.”

“Or you forgot,” Philips corrects, walking over to stand at his bedside. Felix wants to smack her with the pad, but the thing is so damn old that he’s pretty sure it’ll shatter upon impact. And he needs it. For maps.

Felix rubs his forehead with the back of his wrist.

“It’s 3 AM,” Felix says. “Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”

“No,” Philips says, deadpan. No room for arguments. Felix is too tired to try and argue anyways; besides, the sooner Philips talks, the sooner she leaves him the hell alone.

“Whatever.” Felix shrugs. “What do you want?”

“I want —“ she inhales sharply. Felix waits, but instead of finishing her statement she turns away. Like that, Felix can see how tightly her hands are clenched behind her back; white knuckled against the soft wool of her sweater. She goes a long time without saying anything. The longer she stands there, the more Felix just wants her to hurry up so he can get back to his maps.

“You want...” Felix prompts. “What? To get me more pudding?”

“I want you to kill someone,” she says.

Philips turns, and her face is unusually pale, bathed electric in the dancing blue lights of Felix’s monitors. Felix leans back against his pillows and wonders briefly if he heard her correctly, or if the whole thing is some weird fever dream.

“You want me,” he echoes, “Am I hearing you right? You want me to —“

“Kill someone,” she finishes. Her hands drop to her sides, fists still tightly clenched. “For me.”

Felix stares at her. Philips stares back. For a long moment, neither moves.

And then Felix slumps back into his pillows, hand thrown up to cover his eyes as he sinks against the mattress and exhales.

“I knew it,” he mutters.

He’s not sure how he feels, but it’s almost cathartic, how much he means it. Something tight in his chest loosens at her admission; it’s a fantastic feeling, the simple pleasure of breathing easy. The world feels like it’s been righted, clicked back into place where it had once been misaligned and grinding. Beautifully predictable.

Philips does not seem to feel similarly.

“Excuse me?” Philips snaps, face twisted in anger. Felix ignores her, shaking his head in mocking disbelief.

“I knew you had an ultimatum,” he tsks, scolding. He opens his eyes and parts the fingers draping his face just enough to see her scowling through them. “‘All I want is for you to get off planet’ my _ass_. You’re a backstabbing bastard just like the rest of us.”

Philips flushes angrily and crosses her arms. Felix smiles to see it. He feels good.

“Will you do it or not?” She demands, voice low. Mindful of the hour. Felix suddenly finds he could not give a damn. What a stupid question.

“Yeah, I’ll do it,” he says. “I don’t give a shit.”

Felix flips over his pad and powers it back on, clicking away the map when it loads and replacing it with a simple note program. “Who’s the lucky victim?”

Philips shushes him, hands uncrossing to wave nervously at him. Felix rolls his eyes. He’s too tired for tone control; if she wanted mindful she should have cornered him before midnight.

“God, don’t — don’t say it like that,” Philips says.

“Seriously?” Felix rolls his eyes again. He’s starting to wonder what’s going to give him a headache first: Philips, the eye rolling, or sleep exhaustion. He’s banking on a yummy cocktail of all three.

“O-kay...” he drawls, drumming his fingertips on the screen. “Who’s the lucky _target_?”

“One of the hospital patrons,” Philips says and pulls the pad from his hands. A few moments later, it thunks back into his lap, knocking painfully against his knees. The unsmiling face of a balding man stares back at him, grim and pasty. His frown is severe, and his suit looks expensive. Felix is almost disappointed.

Old, rich, boring.

“Heathcliff P. Mountbatten ,” Felix reads, and grimaces. “Yeesh. You said _patron_? What are his crimes? Other than having such a shitty name. Too rich and too ugly?”

“He believes strongly in the UNSC, and he’s not happy about Chorus’s decision to remain independent. Based on a few intercepted messages and a lot of painstakingly substantiated rumors, I have strong reason to believe he’s planning a coup of our fledgling government. One that could potentially stir up another war. Obviously, I can’t let that happen,” She finishes with gusto, looking determined and grim. As if Felix would care.

Well, he kind of cares. Not for the reasons she wants him to, though.

Felix grimaces. “I don’t like political entanglements. Too messy.”

“I don’t care,” Philips says, taking on that cold, no-nonsense voice that Felix so _loves_ to hear. “Will you do it or not?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Do you want me to turn you over to the authorities?”

“Chorus authorities,” Felix huffs. “I think that’s an oxymoron.”

“I could kill you,” she offers. “It would be a waste of time and resources, but I could do it. Save the universe a lot of trouble.”

“So I’m just supposed to be your lackey now, huh? Your secret ace in the hole, huh?” Felix says. “Throw me at a target and hope I hit every ring. Checkmate for Chrous’ own little Earl of Burma.”

“I just need you to kill him,” she scoffs. “No need to be so melodramatic.”

If Felix were to write up a list of words that should be burned at the stake, melodramatic would probably be one of them. Serendipity would probably be on there as well, for no particular reason other than it sucks. Phlegm. Wellness. Condolences. Monster.

Felix has never done a job like this alone before.

“Political _assassinations_ are never simple,” Felix grumbles, but he knows that he’s gonna have to give in. The fact that he can’t shoot his way out of situations anymore is really starting to eek at him. “They have baggage. It’ll probably get traced back to you.”

“I thought you said you were good at your job?” It’s mocking, but the fact that there’s an undercurrent of genuine curiosity almost makes Felix feel bad for her. She has no idea, he thinks. No goddamn idea.

Felix grimaces. “I’m good at killing people. Political espionage is... apparently not my strong suit.”

_You talk too much,_ a voice in his head says, deep and low with quiet fury. _Don’t you ever shut up?_

“I talk too much,” Felix echoes.

“Then just keep your mouth shut,” Philips says.

Easy enough.

—

He’s allowed to shower before he leaves.

It’s like shedding a second skin. He turns the water as hot as it can get, gets dizzy and falls over twice, spends twenty minutes detangling his hair and twenty more scrubbing every crevice of his body, loses hot water about fifteen minutes in, and it’s still the best thing that’s happened to him in months. His leg is slowly starting to look less purple and mangled and more like a leg, and he’s getting used to the other one. Little by little, he’s coming back together. Standing beneath the water, enjoying the simple experience of something pleasant on his skin — it’s like a release of something he’s been carrying for a long time.

But when he sees himself in the mirror afterwards, the glass clear and hauntingly real, he thinks maybe he should step back into the shower and never get out again.

Felix isn’t vain — well, maybe he is vain, but it’s not as if looking good doesn’t serve a purpose. Looking nice makes everything so much easier, and Felix always knew when he looked fucking _nice_ — maybe a little thin, a little sharp, but _good_ all the same. The kind of thin and sharp that could be dangerous in all the best ways.

Now he looks just looks emaciated, skinny and almost feral. His hair is long and limp, dulled and streaked with gray. Yellow and red bruises ring his eyes like he hasn’t slept in months, his skin blotted and purple. His freckles are almost totally gone. And he’s got a scar that he’s never seen before, one that starts at the right side of his forehead and ends just before his jaw; a deep, angry line that bisects his face into two uneven, severe halves. He presses his fingertips to it and it stings with a weird sort of numbness. The scarred skin is inflamed, not yet paled with age.

Scars are sexy, he thinks, _but_.

He doesn’t even remember how he got it.

He doesn’t smash the mirror, but it’s a close call. He keeps the lights off the next time he needs to use the bathroom.

—

Felix leaves the hospital in the dead of night, still a bit shaky on his patchwork legs and struggling with a ship that, for some impossibly stupid reason, had an exorbitant amount of pedals. He sails out of the hospital’s hanger and vows to never fucking return.

The next day, he stands on the top floor of a newly erected building, a penthouse view with a wall of windows facing east. The cameras had been stupid easy to take out, and then it’d been a quick ride to the top floor; the elevator is gilded chrome and so fast that it made Felix’s stomach swoop.

Blood paints the crystal windows, mixing quite nicely with the dying sunset. The late chairman Mountbatten lies still, silhouetted against the view; eyes blown open, blood dripping neatly down his forehead. Twin suns sink below the Chorisian horizon.

And Felix should never work alone, because he gets so damn curious. And he should have hightailed it the hell out of there the second the job was done, but instead he’s standing between a corpse and a mahogany desk, bumping an open cabinet with his rusty knee, cradling a file in his hands like it’s a baby, or a block of solid gold. The outside reads CLASSIFIED; the inside is personal.

Photos. Notes. Hypotheses. Warnings. A collection of facts, some true and some laughably false. Two separate, unsuccessful manhunts and one recovered orange and black chest plate, pulled from the Juvo Tributary

MISSING, the file reads. PRESUMED DEAD, it also reads.

Felix doesn’t take it with him. He can’t. It would be too obvious. There’s too much information from several long, wasted years; the file’s too thick to be some personal project. He can’t take it.

But he gives Mountbatten an extra hole in his head for the trouble, and he steals his overfull keyring.

Within the hour, in a shining personal vessel that has leg room for days and an engine that fucking purrs, Felix breaks through orbit and leaves Chrous in the goddamn dust.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, all! The prequel is finally complete! I’m editing the second part at the moment, and it will hopefully be posted by the end of the week!
> 
> It’s been a wild six months. I transferred universities, moved into an apartment, and got a new job! I tried to work on this nightly, and after so long, I’m so excited to share what I’ve written! To everyone who commented and left kudos on _sour milk_, this is for you — your encouragement kept me writing <3 I never expected to receive so much support, and I’m so grateful to you all!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading to this point! I hope that you enjoyed the first part of this fic, and that the second half will not disappoint! Until then, I hope you have a Happy New Years, and I’ll see you soon!


	2. both a beginning and an end

At first, everything seems alright.

Mountbatten’s ship is beautiful and runs like a dream. It’s got more than enough room to kick around in, and the personal quarters are surprisingly lush. Felix is delighted by how soft the bed is, and the fact that the ship’s faucets run with actual hot water. The cockpit is stupidly high-tech but a bit less comfortable than the rest of the ship, the pilot’s comfort obviously not as much of a priority for a man who doesn’t — didn’t, _ha_ — fly his own vessels. Still, there’s so many screens and holos in place of the typical dials and buttons that it just about makes Felix’s head spin. 

Either way, he likes it. It’s a nice reprieve. There’s touchpads everywhere, a steam option in the shower, and cryo-fresh fruit in the kitchenette. It almost feels like a goddamn vacation. 

But after a while, somewhere between accidentally shattering one of the touchpads and purposefully shattering one of the touchpads, Felix fully comes to realize that he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s _doing_ anymore. After that, it doesn’t take too long for the full force of his life to hit him like a fucking truck.

He’s got no partner, no contacts, no connections to anyone or anything. He’s got a leg that barely works and another that hurts so bad most days that it takes him an hour to get out of his stupid, cushy bed. He’s got nothing to his name: no money, no gear, no weapons. Nothing but the clothes on his back and the rations that he finds on his stolen ship.

Nothing.

Once he comes to realize that, it feels a lot less like a vacation.

—

He’s starting to think more and more about the old days. It’s like the release into space has crumbled some of his mental blocks, and he’s back to old habits; old habits that include, unfortunately, overthinking, insomnia, and relentless bursts of furious insecurity. There’s no flashes of confidence that border on narcissism to break it all up, either, or someone around that he can irritate until he feels better. It’s just one shitty feeling after another, rolling and mixing and blending into one turbulent stomach ache.

Chorus leeches into his thoughts like there’s a crack in his psyche, and he can’t figure out how to mend it. He’s haunted by voices and names and faces and the way the tall trees swayed in the wind. He thinks about everything that went wrong and everything he could have done differently; he thinks about crashing into the temple, and the way his ears had rang as, minutes later, he’d fallen from that great height.

He thinks about Locus.

In fact, the more alone he is, and the more alone he _feels_, the harder it is to _not_ think about Locus. They’d been symbiotic for so long, living both together and apart for years and years, and Felix had been so comfortable knowing that Locus had his back.

Now it’s like there’s a hole in his chest, and it’s cold and achy and he can’t figure out how to get rid of it. He tries to purposely act like he doesn’t care, because he _doesn’t_, but it never works. Everything is so subconscious. Felix leaves the pilots’ chair to the left empty, always opting for the right. He sleeps in the bedroom further from the bathroom. He never stacks boxes in the hanger, he never leaves his dishes in the sink, and he types coordinates in degree and decimal minutes instead of degrees, minutes, and seconds.

He tries to do otherwise, but it feels so wrong and forced that he quits trying by day three. It just feels natural to live like he’s existing beside someone else.

Probably why it hurts so badly when he realizes, over and over again, that he’s alone, and Locus is gone. Locus is gone, and he isn’t coming back.

He feels angry and tired and so goddamn alone and it doesn’t take him long to grow sick of it, but he doesn’t know what to do about it either. So he lays in his soft bed and stares at the ceiling and cleans the ship’s vents and obsessively combs through the data on his HUD chip and distracts himself with petty shit until, eventually, he runs out of food.

At least then he has a purpose again.

—

For a while, Felix does some odd jobs. None of them require much more than petty grunt work or a hole in someone’s head, but they’re pretty hard to find without someone helping him look, and Felix needs money so he takes what he can get. Luckily, they pay well, and it’s not long before Felix’s brand new bank account fills itself with a hefty little sum.

It’s mostly smooth sailing, but the anonymity issue is a bit tricky— Felix never knows if he’s gonna get recognized in the more high-profile jobs. Maybe it’s just paranoia, but he always feels like he’s a step away from tripping and bashing his brains out. Like he’s constantly walking a tightrope over disaster. 

It takes him an embarrassingly long time to realize how much he’s changed. Physically, he knows he’s different, skinnier and more scarred than ever before, but there’s been some mental switch as well. He feels so defeated all the time; people don’t make him as angry as they used to, and nothing _inspires_ him anymore. He kills without passion and survives without living. He doesn’t get involved in jobs that he can’t do alone, and he doesn’t hesitate to back out if he starts falling in too deep. He doesn’t talk as much; in fact, he hardly talks at all.

So, even after a while spent tight to the grindstone, no one recognizes him. No one suspects him of anything, and no one asks him any questions. He gets in, he gets out, he gets paid. It should be a relief.

It’s not.

—

Felix grows his hair out.

After a while stuck in emotional limbo, he decides that there's a strange power to knowing that he's becoming someone else. That he has _become_ someone else. His hair grows to his shoulders, his newer scars heal and grow pale, the bags beneath his eyes darken,and the lines of his face harden. As a kid, he'd read somewhere that bodies replace themselves every seven or eight years; there's a comfort to knowing that someday he'll be someone that Locus never knew. Someone who never knew Locus.

Maybe by then, the sickening pull in his gut, the strange, shuddering snap of his attention every time he catches a shadow in the corner of his eye, the way that he’s been dreaming of hands that he doesn't even truly know — maybe by then, all of that will have turned to ash.

That's all Felix really wants at this point. To be done with it. To forget their petty arguments, their shared silences, their explosive victories. The quiet exhalation of Locus’ laugh and the way the broad line of his back felt pressed up against Felix’s. To forget the times that he looked at Locus and felt a swoop of joy in his lungs. To forget the way that Felix clung to him, so woefully ignorant to how Locus never held on in return.

Stupid.

—

Felix stops keeping track of the days.

Hours blend into meaningless things when flying through empty space. There's no days, no nights; Felix sleeps when he's tired, which isn't often, and eats when he’s hungry, which is even less. At least sleep is a better alternative to listening to his mind churn in silence; he just wishes the nightmares weren't so frequent.

And _fuck_, the _nightmares_. Felix used to pride himself on his visionless sleep; used to claim that it meant he was untouchable. If war couldn't stick to him, nothing could. Sure, there were nights in which he would wake up sticky with sweat, screaming the aftershock of some stranger’s name; but as long he didn't remember anything, it didn't matter. The human body doesn't remember pain — Felix applied that as a catch-all to every sliver of discourse in his life. Always had, always planned to.

Now it seems as though his brain is making up for lost time. Every time he falls asleep, he sees the faces of people that he hasn't remembered in years; torn apart or tearing him apart or morphing between stages of agonized deconstruction and decay. His eyelids are a goddamn movie screen for the world's most gruesome projector. The eighth time that he dreams about Locus, armored and impossibly large, choking Felix with both hands wrapped tight around his neck, he wakes up crying. He scrubs the tears from his eyes, slaps himself so hard that his ears ring, and decides that sleeping is for the fucking birds.

The day that he cries about Locus again, he decides, his cheek and palm burning and his eyes on fire, will be the day that Felix finally ends it.

—

The thing about spending months in relative isolation, Felix decides, is that it gives you a lot of time to think.

Space is cold and emotionless, and the things that scatter the darkness between galaxies are even more so. Felix spends days sitting silently in the cockpit, steering the ship between even the smallest revolving hunks of space rock, alert for any alarming jolts or hits that may mean he's been hit.

The other thing about being alone in space is that the line between certain death and steady travels is razor thin. A dislodged heat plate, a cracked windshield, a blown engine; there are an infinite amount of things that could go wrong. Felix may be good with his hands, but he doesn't know mechanics the way that Locus does.

The way that Locus _did_.

God, fuck him. The bastard might as well be dead.

Uncharted space is like a freshly-sharpened blade; sleek and nice to look at, so long as its edge isn't pointed in your direction. Beautiful and cold. Locus never liked it, but Felix used to dream of the days they spent on the edges of civilization. It was like free falling with the ground hidden from view; a kind of hidden danger that made his breath catch and his pulse quicken.

Now, he stares out across the dark swathes of faded starfields and tries to pick out signs of planet life. The adrenaline of being at the mercy of the universe has faded into a constant, anxious thrum in his chest, and he yearns for something like solid earth beneath his feet. The day that he finds himself missing the crunch of dirt beneath his shoes is the day that he realizes he's slipped past saving; space is no longer a haven for him, and he doesn't think it ever will be again.

Too many uncontrollable variables.

Too many memories, maybe.

He's not afraid, not really; in fact, part of him thinks that dying alone and wasting away into the stars wouldn't be a bad way to go. Kind of romantic, really, in its own twisted way.

But another, far more insistent part of him kicks into action every time that thoughts of disquiet begin to fade into acquiesced acceptance. He's got things to do before space smothers him in her grasp.

It's a reoccurring thing with him, the feeling of unfinished business. The problem is that he can't quite figure out what, exactly, he wants to do. The desire to hunt Locus and gut him like a fish has long faded; he tried to cling to it, tried to smother it in his throat with clenched teeth and bloody fists, but somewhere along the way between Chorus and infinity it slipped from his grasp. The fire of his anger smoldered and was snuffed out; it dripped like hot wax from his bleeding hands, melting him down until there was nothing left to burn.

He's been left bereft, tired and undone; but he's kept alive the little niggling scream in his head that says he's not quite finished.

Luckily, he’s got plenty of time to figure everything out. Time and silence and sparsely habited space.

What else is there to do but think?

—

Felix finds the safehouse map while clearing out old data packages, tucked amidst the schematics for a building that he no longer recognizes. It's just random enough that it must have been deliberate; a habit of Locus’ that Felix used to find delightfully contradictory.

Now, he just sighs, the breath ragged in his throat. He trashes the old mission plans and unlocks the file.

Locus’ notes unscroll on the screen. Felix looks through the long list of names, addresses, and inventory with a disinterested eye. It's nice to have — now he'll never worry about running out of money — but seeing the small-font, well-kept notes makes his chest feel uncomfortably tight. He almost wants to delete it, to siphon it away amongst all the other meaningless files. Some sort of childish “fuck you” to the specter of Locus that exists through his handiwork.

If a tree falls…

Felix sighs again, closes his eyes, and randomly selects a location.

—

It's not his fault.

Felix tells himself this with a conviction that he possesses for nothing else, steering doubt from his mind with all the skill of an aged shepherd.

It's not his fault that Locus betrayed him. He was won over by lofty promises of redemption by a man in gold-trimmed armor, a man who promised Locus things that the world had no right to give him. Felix is a good liar, but maybe Washington was just _better_. Or maybe Washington just knew what to say to a man seeking what could only be described as a way out.

How else could he have convinced Locus to betray Felix?

And that's the way it is; Locus dealt the killing blow. Felix won't deny his own manipulations, but he never so much as dreamt of betraying his partner. Locus was invaluable, and Felix would have done anything to keep him on his side. The _correct_ side. If that meant Locus stayed in limbo, if that meant that he continued having nightmares that left him breathless and lost in tears, if that meant that Locus never recovered from the horrors of a war, of a life that gradually stole everything away from him — then so be it. Better safe than sorry, and all of that bullshit.

It's not Felix’s fault.

Besides, Felix didn't abandon Locus when all his cards were spilled, flashing warning signs amidst the faded ink of their promised divinations. Felix didn't abandon Locus and elope with his enemy, tearing apart years and years of a hard-won partnership with one vital inaction.

Locus betrayed Felix, not the other way around.

It's as simple as breathing, at first. To believe it. To ardently swear that Locus was the one in the wrong. That Felix was betrayed at a level way past forgiveness. Past redemption.

After a few months, it gets a little harder to swallow.

After a year, he stops trying.

—

Siris looks almost the same as he did all those years ago, when he handed Felix his gun with a war-weary look in his eyes and told him that he was done.

“I’m sorry,” he'd said, voice straining under the exhaustion lining his brow as he stared at the unmoving figure of Locus, lying bloodied on the back alley operating table. Felix hadn't even had the luxury of arguing with him about it; looking down at Locus, hungrily clinging to every rise and fall of his bruised chest, he’d found he couldn't really blame him.

Now, Siris looks a bit older, maybe; there's silver shot through the roots of his hair and a more defined edge to the wrinkles around his eyes. Even so, as he stands in his doorway staring at Felix with an air of disbelief, he carries that same weariness as he did before. All that's missing is a broken body lying between them.

“What are you doing here, Felix?” Siris asks, voice hushed. It’s 2 AM in middle class suburbia, the early hour punctuated by a gentle sprinkle of rain. The sound of Felix’s alias spoken from the tongue of Mason Wu sends a shudder down his spine. 

How long has it been? Since someone spoke his name aloud? Since someone helped remind him with simple acknowledgement that he exists?

Felix exhales quietly, lifts his hands to prove them empty, and shrugs.

“I was in the neighborhood.”

Siris takes in the ragged state of his clothes, the dirt that splatters his boots and the bandages that cover his bruised knuckles. After a moment, he shakes his head, a minuscule back-and-forth motion; but it's less of a _no_ and more of an _are you fucking kidding me_.

“You look like shit,” Siris comments. The set to his shoulders still tells Felix that he's not totally comfortable with the situation, but he wouldn't be the Siris that Felix knows if he was.

“Feel like it too,” Felix chuckles, lifting a hand to pull nervously at the front of his shirt collar. “I need your help, Wu.”

Siris slowly shakes his head again, gaze fixed on Felix’s hand as if he's about to pull a gun from his throat.

“What kind of help?” Siris asks warily. “Because I meant it, man, I'm done. I've _been_ done.”

Siris’ hand tightens on the doorframe. The divot between his eyebrows and the way his false foot shifts minutely backwards are enough to tell Felix that he's expecting a fight. It would be insulting if it wasn't completely justified.

Felix has Siris cornered at his heartland; even Felix can be sympathetic to how that feels.

Felix holds his hands up again in what he hopes is a placating gesture.

“Nothing illegal, I promise,” he says, “or even dangerous. To you, anyway. Can I come in? I don't know if you noticed, but it's raining out here and I'm not keen on catching hypothermia and croaking on your front porch.”

Siris clenches his jaw. A moment stretches between them, living and tense. Felix can practically hear him thinking.

And then Siris breaks it with an exhale and a slump of his shoulders.

“Christ, you're still an asshole,” Siris mutters, but he opens the door wide and steps out of the way.

The inside of Siris’ home is warm and light despite the rain, decorated with wood paneling and wool carpetand discarded toys tucked into corners. Siris points out where to kick his muddy boots and then leads Felix into the kitchen.

“Nice place,” Felix praises, pausing to examine a picture of Siris in what is obviously wedding garb, holding a woman with a beaming face tightly in his arms. Felix lifts a finger to rub at the cheap metal frame, trying not to grimace at how happy they look together. “Where's the wife?”

“Meg took a long weekend to visit her mom. The girls went with her.” Siris’ voice echoes in the empty house. “Get off the hardwood before you stain it.”

Felix obediently heads into the tiled kitchen, to a large marble island at the kitchen’s heart. One of the several available barstools, surrounding the island like ships at a dock, scrapes loudly against the ground as he pulls it out and hops on.

The refrigerator to his left is covered with mementos, photos, and drawings. A sticker-covered report card sits over a stack of drawings. All A’s.

_Smart kid._

“Always knew you’d embrace upper middle class suburbia. Cookie cutter houses and all,” Felix says. Siris straightens up from where he'd been rummaging in the cabinet beneath the sink and throws a hand towel at him. Felix catches it. It's decorated with embroidered rabbits.

“Speaking of houses, how'd you find me, anyways?” Siris asks. The look on his face says that he's asking out of something more than simple curiosity.

“Phonebook,” Felix says flippantly. “The hell is this for?”

“You're dripping on my floor.”

“Get me a real fucking towel, then.”

Siris exhales forcefully through his nose and walks out of the kitchen. Felix watches him as he heads down the hall and disappears around a corner; when he re-emerges, he's got two large towels balanced in his arms.

Like the hand towel, he throws them at Felix as soon as he's close enough to reach. One smacks into Felix’s chin; the other hits his chest and plops softly into his lap.

“Fuck you,” Felix huffs, tossing one down to soak up the puddle at his feet. He wraps the other around his shoulders, turning his head to rub one cheek against the soft material. It smells good, like bleach and artificial flowers.

They sit in silence for a moment. Siris stands across the kitchen, arms crossed and leaning stiffly up against the counter by the fridge. His face is distant, the expression of someone lost in thought. The marble island looms like an ocean between them.

“Thanks for the towels,” Felix offers when he's sufficiently dry.

Siris sighs. “How'd you find me, Felix? Seriously. I — I need to know.”

He doesn't say why, but Felix can read between the lines. If Felix can find him, then maybe so can other unsavory figures from their distant pasts. It would be a long shot — it's been years, for one, and they'd kept themselves mostly anonymous for another — but Siris always liked to live on the side of “better safe than sorry.” Felix used to call him paranoid; Locus used call it common sense.

Christ, they used to argue over the stupidest shit.

Felix blows a raspberry.

“We — well, not _we_, because to be honest, after you left, I didn't give a shit where you went — but Locus never lost track of you.”

Saying his name aloud burns. Felix tips his head down to rest his forehead in his palm, elbow propped on the countertop.

“I guess he wanted to be able to find you if you ever needed — if we — I don't know. But that's how I found you. He kept logs, and I had automatic backups of all our shit stored on my HUD. Took me days to crack them, but. Well. Here.”

Felix digs into his pocket and fishes out a small drive, roughly the size of his thumb’s fingernail. He tosses it onto the island and it slides across the sanded surface, coming to rest on the edge opposite Felix.

“It’s all on there,” Felix points, “No copies, not even on my HUD. Encrypted to all hell. Do what you want with it.”

Siris scoops up the drive, turning it back and forth and inspecting its surface as if he could read the files from the outside. Once he's satisfied that the thing won't blow up in his face, he looks back up at Felix.

“Locus?”

It's a question that Felix doesn't really want to parse the intonation of. He shrugs.

“Yeah.”

“No, I mean —”

Siris looks at Felix with a pinched expression, fingers subconsciously closing over the thumb drive. He swallows and glances over Felix’s shoulder, as if Locus is about to materialize outside the glass of his curtained bay windows. When he doesn't, because _duh_, Siris looks back at Felix and swallows again.

“Is he —”

Siris doesn't finish the thought — doesn't say _alive_, and definitely doesn't say the opposite — but Felix hears both in the halted tremor of his voice.

“No idea.” Felix lifts and lowers one of his shoulders in as casual a gesture as he can manage. Because he doesn't care. He really, really doesn't, and for some reason he feels the need to prove this to both Siris and himself.

“What do you mean, _no idea_,” Siris asks, incredulous. His tone implies that the mere idea of Felix not knowing Locus’ whereabouts, let alone whether he's even still kicking, has entirely upended his worldview.

Felix rolls his eyes, squashing the tiny, mourning ache in his gut that knows exactly how that feels.

“It means that I have no idea.” Felix shrugs again, a little more aggressively. “I haven't seen him in months, Siris, and the last time I did, we were galaxies away from here. He could be dead for all I know.”

Felix lifts his head from his hand to find Siris staring at him, wide-eyed and so aghast that Felix almost wants to laugh at him. As it is, he just feels uneasy, small sparks of anger building in his chest.

“What the hell happened?” Siris finally asks.

For some reason, it feels like something inside Felix’s chest cracks apart and spills, acrid and thick, into his lungs.

Felix wants so badly to be angry at Siris’ ignorance; at the fact that _no_, Siris _wouldn't_ know what happened, because how could he? He has no idea, because he left, and Felix wants to feed the little sparks in his chest until they become a furious bonfire, and he wants to be _angry_.

He wants to rekindle the part of himself that raged at Siris’s abandonment, the resentment that he felt for years after the end of their partnership. He wants to rediscover the part of himself that was once vibrant with pain and thoughts of revenge, because at least they were brighter and sharper than the dull ache that's taken up residence in his gut. God, Felix had wanted to _kill_ Siris at one point, and now he's standing in the man’s kitchen with hands as steady as the pattering rain outside.

The thing is, maybe, that Felix has had time to think, so now he knows his anger hadn’t been rooted in hatred. It was jealousy, plain and simple; a jealousy of Siris’ ability to simply drop who he was in the face of discordance and recreate himself anew. Rather than fucking up again and again and again, rather than digging a grave so deep that the sides collapsed around him and buried him alive, Siris got out.

And Felix — well. 

The silence has stretched between them for long enough.

Felix curls his hands on the cool marble and then flattens them, pressing his fingertips down until they go white around the nail.

“I fucked up,” Felix says.

Siris goes still, even his breathing stuttering in a sharp inhale, and Felix stares down at his hands, at the way the marble whorls around his fingers. It almost feels like guilt, but it's more somber than that; more sorrowful.

In the muted light of Mason Wu’s kitchen, staring at the space between his hands and infinity, Felix realizes that he is, and has been for a while, filled to the brim with furious regret. 

Siris sighs and the light of his fridge briefly fills the kitchen. When it shuts, the click of the door is followed by the signature pop of a beer can opening. One clacks down on the counter a short reach away. Siris takes a long sip from his own can; Felix doesn't miss the quiet, whispered _fuck_ as it's breathed from Siris’ lips, and finds himself quite in agreement with him, actually. 

Because, well. Fuck.

Felix takes his can and holds it, but doesn't open it. He doesn't recognize the brand — never liked beer much at all, to be honest — but is grateful to merely have something to hold.

Siris exhales loudly. Felix looks up in question and Siris points a finger at him, waving it up and down from his chest to his leg. “Does it have something to do with —”

Felix chuckles. “You noticed?”

“Obviously,” Siris grumbles, shaking his own leg. It hisses quietly in response to the loose movement.

Felix taps his own mechanical leg against the counter. It makes a hollow, jamming sound and Siris grimaces at the sound of a prosthetic that's more rust than metal. Felix doesn't blame him; he's honestly surprised that he hasn't croaked from either tetanus or sepsis yet.

“I'll give you the name of my old mechanic,” Siris offers, still grimacing as he takes another sip of his beer. “You shouldn't be walking on that thing.”

Felix snorts and rolls his eyes, but he doesn't deny it. It's a pretty shitty leg.“Appreciate it.”

“Yeah, well. No skin off my back, man,” Siris shrugs. “And I'm sure she'll appreciate the business.”

Felix shrugs and pops open his beer.

“But I mean, Christ, Felix…” Siris runs a hand through his hair. “What happened? What did you _do_?”

Felix takes a shallow sip from the can and grimaces as the taste washes over his tongue. He still hates beer, especially the shitty, local-type stuff that Siris has always had a soft spot for. He tips it to the side to read the bright red label, carefully avoiding making eye contact.

“Ruined a lot of lives,” he says simply. “Mine included. Probably.”

Siris steers himself. After a moment, he sighs. “That's not really an answer.”

Felix takes a deep drink from the can and practically slams it back down onto the counter. He taps his fingers against the aluminum cylinder, teeth catching against his lower lip and biting down as he wars against a surge of something hot and nauseous in his lungs.

“Chorus,” he says. 

Siris closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Strangely enough, Felix is both relieved and disappointed by his nonreaction.

“I had suspicions,” Siris sighs.

Felix cracks a smile. Familiar ground feels good to stand on. “Still work in intelligence, huh?”

“What else.”

“Never really took you for a one-trick pony, bud.”

“Shut up. Someone's gotta keep ONI afloat,” Siris says, but he suddenly sounds exhausted, leaning back against the counter like he's got the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“ONI, huh? You sold out.”

Siris chuckles. “I don't want to hear jack shit from _you_ about selling out.”

An image of Malcom Hargrove flashes, unbidden, in the back of Felix’s mind. “That's fair.”

The rain outside is insistent against the kitchen’s bay windows. Felix takes a moment to listen to it, to the thunderous silence of planetary white noise.

Space is so fucking quiet.

Felix can feel Siris staring.

“What do you need from me, Felix?” Siris breaks the silence like a ship coming in to port, gentle and inevitable as the tide but with measurable, finite purpose. He sounds as tired as Felix feels.“You didn't come here to chat.”

“Maybe I did.”

“Maybe you did, but I know that you didn't.” Siris crushes his empty beer can and looks longingly towards the refrigerator. “What do you want, Felix? Why did you come here?”

“Do you want me to be honest?” The sick feeling still lingers, heavy, below his ribs, churning up bile in the back of his throat.

“Knowing you,” Siris shrugs, “that’s probably too much to ask.”

Felix can't bring himself to deny it.

“I'm trying to find the reds and blues,” he says. “I'm sure you've heard of them. They tend to wreak disaster wherever they go.”

“Sounds like someone else I know.”

“Ha ha.” Felix rolls his eyes.

“What happened to all those contacts of yours?” Siris asks. “Since when do you need help tracking _anybody_?”

“So you do know where they are,” Felix points out, recognizing a deflection the moment he hears it.

Siris shrugs. He also doesn't respond, fixing Felix with a stare that says he's more than happy to stay quiet until Felix provides some answers of his own. He's smug, almost. 

God. Felix hates him. 

“I'm dead,” Felix deadpans. “As long as I'm dead, no one bothers me. And I get the feeling that there's at least a few bounties on me worth way more than any confidentiality I could currently buy, so. It’s to my benefit to stay dead, at least for a while. But... I have lost touch, since... well.”

“Dead people don't keep contacts,” Siris completes.

“Dead people don't keep contacts,” Felix echoes.

“Right. And you want the reds and blues because —”

“Because they have something of mine.” It's not exactly a lie. “And I'd like it back.”

Siris walks over to the fridge. The refrigerator light momentarily bathes him in a yellow glow as he grabs another beer. The door slips shut, and the pop of the cap is like a gunshot in the quiet of the kitchen.

“Is it a weapon?”

Felix blinks. He tilts his head. He thinks of the key.

“Not officially.”

“But technically?”

Siris takes a long sip and stares dead-on at Felix, leaning back against the counter. When Felix doesn't respond, electing instead to return the stare with a glare as acidic as he can manage, Siris lowers the can from his lips and sighs.

“What are you gonna do with it?”

Felix squints. He hadn't gotten that far. Part of him will never stop wanting to put something sharp between Wash’s — or maybe Tucker’s — ribs, but that isn't what he wants the key for. Isn't what he _needs_ it for.

What _does_ he need it for?

_“They have something of mine.”_

_I'd like it back._

That's it. He can't have Locus back. But he can have that damned sword.

“I'm going to take it with me,” he says slowly, tasting each word as they crumble across his tongue.

“Where?” Siris lifts a brow.

“Where?” Felix rolls his eyes. “Away. Goddamn, if you're not going to help me —”

“I didn't say I wasn't going to help you —”

“Shut up! Shut up,” Felix interrupts. “Yes or no, Wu. I've wasted enough time here.”

Siris takes another sip of his beer. It's a long one, dragging and even, and it's a moment before Felix realizes that he's chugging the remainder. It doesn't take long.

“If I tell you where they are,” Siris asks, crushing and tossing the empty can into the sink, “will you kill them?”

Felix wishes he had something to twirl between his fingers. A knife would be preferable, but a coin would suffice. He's not feeling picky. Instead, he just thrums his fingers against the table, tapping lighting at the cold marble countertop.

“A few months ago, I would have said yes,” Felix says. “Maybe even a month ago. Hell, a month ago I probably would have shot you dead the moment you opened the door.”

To Siris’ credit, he doesn't so much as blink.

“But now?” Siris prompts.

“Now, I just — don't give a shit.”

“Done with killing?”

“Hell no,” Felix barks a laugh, but it's hollow. Not ingenuine, but still empty. “No.”

Siris shakes his head. “Well, I figured I’d ask. So what changed, if not that?”

Felix sighs. “Who the fuck knows.”

There's a clock ticking in the hallway, something so small becoming a deafening force in the silence of Siris’ empty home. Felix tries not to let it bother him; that constant reminder that time is always passing. It does anyway.

“Okay,” Siris acquiesces after what feels like a lifetime. “I'll tell you where they are.”

—

The rain has slowed to a drizzle. Felix steps down from Siris’ porch, hood raised, and hesitates. The paper in his pocket crinkles against the knuckles of his right hand. On it, written the plans that will guide the next year of Felix’s life. Possibly the last year he'll ever choose to live.

The little slip of paper is indescribably heavy.

Siris stands in his doorway, hand resting on the doorknob. Felix swallows.

His lungs feel as though something is scratching at them from the inside.

“Siris — Mason, I —” he folds the paper in his fist and squeezes gently. A ‘thank you’ rests thick on his tongue, but he's never been one for words of gratitude. Not when they really count. Before, he found them pointless. Now, they just feel strangely out of reach.

Siris eyes Felix up and down as he opens and closes his mouth wordlessly, biting the inside of his cheek as he tries to think of something to say. Locus was the one who said this kind of stuff; the useless dribble that came after jobs were complete, the kind of statements that smoothed egos or ensured future cooperations. Felix riled them up; Locus brought them down.

But it's just Felix here.

Siris glances over his shoulder, into the warm darkness of his home. When he turns back around, there's something pinched about the turn of his mouth. Something thoughtful.

“Do you ever regret it?” Siris asks.

Siris could be talking about anything. The lack of specification makes the question universal, with “it” as the singular constant. _It_ could be the war. _It_ could be Locus and Felix’s first meeting, the first time they killed together. _It_ could be the partnership with Siris, the jobs that they took, the breaking of said partnership. _It_ could be Chorus or Hargrove or all the people that Felix has killed in cold blood.

It could be anything. It could be everything.

It could be Locus.

Where Felix had been stumbling, he finds solid ground, plants his feet, and rises up.

He decides.

“No,” Felix answers, voice unwavering.

And he means it more than anything.

—

First stop on Siris’ post-it: Colony XG3, located on a moon orbiting the planet Lilia. It’s a dusty wasteland with a little mining city planted in the center of it, populated with way too many people all living within the same tiny area. It's a pretty shitty spot, but it's easy enough to blend in with the run-down locals, and the density means that checking off the first item on his list is practically effortless.

Kal Dufrese takes to Felix well enough as soon as he name drops Mason Wu (and assures her that he has plenty of credits in his bank account). Her workshop is a lot more impressive than he expected, but he's got to hand it to Siris — he's always had hookups in the strangest of places.

Unfortunately, after just barely managing to keep Dufrese from tossing his rusty leg into her dumpster of a trashcan, the bad news starts rolling in.

“This was a weird break,” she says in a smoker’s growl, hands massaging roughly at the scarred skin above his nerve hookup. The dark plating of his metal knee is out of place amidst the chrome shine of her workroom. “You land on it funny?”

Felix almost barks a laugh at the grave understatement. His thigh tingles under the firm, pinprick-painful presses of her hand. “You could say that.”

“Well,” she says casually, as if she isn't about to completely derail his plans for the next six months, “your knee is misaligned. You'll need it fixed before I outfit you with anything from this century.”

“_Fixed_?” Felix echoes, testing the word on his tongue. He grimaces. “Care to elaborate on that?”

“No,” she says. “But I will. Your hookup is the wrong size for your leg, meaning that anything I attach to it will probably break it; I'm surprised that it hasn't broken already. The plates will have to be removed and replaced, which will be difficult and lengthy: the grafting is such an intricate process.”

If he ever sees Philips again, Felix decides there and fucking then, he’s going to throttle her.

“Okay,” Felix says. “Fine. Fine, whatever. I'll pay to switch it out. Whatever.”

“That's not all,” Dufrese says. “Your hip —”

“Christ, could you just —”

Dufrese leans back and stares at him, her notched eyebrows raised. Felix’s arms, wrapped around the rusted metal sprain of his old leg, tighten. He takes a deep breath. “I — Just tell me what needs to be done. Please.”

Dufrese glances down at his knee.

“You're not gonna like it,” she says.

Felix almost laughs. Almost. Instead, he sighs, hugs his leg a little tighter, and closes his eyes.

“Story of my fucking life,” he says.

—

He doesn't like it.

—

It takes six months and several years off of Felix’s life, but he finally leaves Colony XG3 with a new leg and a severely depleted credit account.

Pros and cons.

Either way, it feels good to be back on the metaphorical road, and Felix is downright delighted to find that travel is much easier now that he's not dealing with so much chronic pain. Sure, being a cyborg is an adjustment, and he still flinches every time that he sees his lower half in the mirror, but at least he can sit down for several hours without punching a wall.

Or crying. One or the other.

Pros and goddamn cons.

He's got a new leg, a new fucking _hip_, in fact — the dark chrome plating sticks out over the waistband of his pants like a pair of the universe’s most grotesque briefs, but at least he still has his dick — and a long list of people and places that are due an untimely visit. They're mostly safe house locations, but Felix doesn't discriminate, so there's a few overdue vengeance kills listed on there as well.

Most important, though: The post-it from Siris, dormant for so many months, is taped front and center above the pilot’s seat. Felix has the image of it burned into his mind, but it's nice to see the physical thing itself. To touch the faded paper and know that everything is real.

He locks in the coordinates for the moon colony Delta VI, scratches a location off of his list, and floors it.

—

Felix begins a campaign of reclamation, re: breaking into old safe houses and collecting all of his shit. It’s time consuming work, and surprisingly exhausting. Felix expected the physical part: climbing up and down stairs over and over really kills his knees, and the amount of third floor apartments on Felix’s list is, quite frankly, fucking ridiculous.

But even faster than he gets sick of his aching knees, Felix gets sick of the mental strain. Who knew things like worn-down couches and thrifted paperbacks could be so gut-wrenchingly effective at psychological sabotage? A familiar smell, a familiar hall, a familiar sound — and Felix is grabbed by the throat and thrown back in time. He hears things, like heavy footsteps in adjacent rooms and the opening and closing of refrigerator doors — a voice calling his name, a question hidden within it — and he’s always alone, always paranoid out of his mind and hallucinating between the choking breaths and dropped, scattered bullets. Collecting himself as he collects memories and fragments of a past that he consciously destroyed.

He’s always alone.

He burns down more of those apartment buildings than he probably should.

—

_[ ‘You know we're going to have to be careful. Siris said that —”_

_“Christ, Locus, would you calm down? It's not like this is my first scouting mission. I know how —” ]_

...

_[ “Felix, what's your ETA?”_

_“Hang on, I'm —”_

_“Felix —”_

_“Christ, give me a minute! I've got three cruisers on me, just hang on —” ]_

…

_[ “God, will you shut up? You're acting like such a douche right now.”_

_“Felix, I'm sick of you never —”_

_“Don't you fucking start —” ]_

…

_[ “Locus, are you okay? Something’s wrong, I think we've been compromised. Can you hear me?”_

_“…”_

_“Locus? Locus, do you copy?!”_

_“…”_

_“Sam, I swear to God, if you're ignoring me I'll fucking run over there and kill you myself. Can you hear me? Are you okay?”_

_“…”_

_“Fuck —” ]_

…

_[ “Jesus, you scared me. What are you doing out here? It's late.”_

_“I could say the same to you.”_

_“Yeah, well, only one of us sticks to a bedtime. Excuse me for wondering why Mr. Strict is breaking his stringent routine.”_

_“Why are you still in your armor?”_

_“Just taking a little extra time to unwind. Don’t worry about it.”_

_“I wasn’t.”_

_“Whatever, smartass. What are you doing up?”_

_“…”_

_“Is your back bothering you? I told you to ice it before bed. Did you forget?”_

_“…”_

_“Goddamn it, Locus, why don't you ever — whatever. It's fine. I'll go get the ice pack. Just wait here, okay? Actually, no, I'll meet you in your room. Give me a few —”_

_“Isaac.”_

_“…Yeah?”_

_“Wait.”_

_“You've got my wrist in a death grip. Don't have much of a choice there, chief.”_

_“…”_

_“Okay, fine. I'll stay. Just — let go before you break my fucking arm.”_

_“Sorry.”_

_“It's whatever.”_

_“…”_

_“So… someone’s obviously jittery. You wanna tell me what's going on?”_

_“Not really.”_

_“Wrong answer.”_

_“…”_

_“Look, you're already here. Might as well fess up. You having nightmares?”_

_“No.”_

_“Okay. Uh… you missed my riveting company?”_

_“No.”_

_“Liar.”_

_“…”_

_“And it's not your back?”_

_“No.”_

_“You're really dragging this out, man.”_

_“They're not nightmares.”_

_“… care to elaborate?”_

_“...”_

_“Earth to Locus.”_

_“No.”_

_“I swear to God —”_

_“I just keep seeing it.”_

_“...Seeing it?”_

_“Seeing them. Over and over. When I close my eyes, it's like… it's like I'm reliving it. Like I'm drowning. Like I can still hear them screaming.”_

_“...”_

_“...”_

_“That's a little melodramatic.”_

_“Isaac, for once in your fucking life, could you just —”_

_“Sorry, sorry. I'm sorry. Not funny.”_

_“…”_

_“You're talking about… about the mission? Right?”_

_“…”_

_“…Locus, I don’t — Look, it wasn't our fault, we had no way of knowing —”_

_“But we did. We knew the chances. And we still...”_

_“...”_

_“Do you ever feel like we've become people that we never intended to be? Like somewhere along the way we lost track of something. Something… really important. Something that made us… more than the killing. More than this.”_

_“…”_

_“Isaac?”_

_“I think the lack of sleep is getting to you. Try jogging a few laps around the cargo bay. It usually works for me.”_

_“Isaac, I —”_

_“Quit calling me that. At least follow your own goddamn rule.  
_

_“...”_

_”Look, it's — it’s late. You should go to bed. You're supposed to receive that call from Siris early tomorrow, remember?”_

_“Where are you going?”_

_“I'll figure it out when I get there.” ]_

Felix shuts off the voice recording. With shaking hands, he removes his borrowed helmet and throws it to the side; it rolls off the bed and hits the floor with a muffled _thunk_.

He feels sick. His arms fall, boneless, onto the mattress, bouncing once or twice before settling. It was a bad idea to get drunk, he thinks. Drunk Felix makes bad decisions: decisions like unearthing his HUD chip from the cockpit computers, loading it into the first helmet that he finds in storage, and scrolling through the hours of conversations that he has recorded. Drunk Felix thinks that that sounds like fun. Drunk Felix sees no issue with that idea.

And several hours later, sober Felix, staring at the ceiling and white-knuckling the sheets beneath his hands, is wishing that he could go back in time and kill himself.

Way back.

—

One night, while Felix is traversing the edge of deep space, the ship’s radar goes crazy.

He’s out in the middle of nowhere, kicking it and playing wall-ball with the world’s cleanest tennis ball (courtesy of the ship’s weird but appreciated entertainment crate), when something rocks the entire vessel. It takes Felix a few seconds to realize that he’s either going through an asteroid field or he’s being shot at, and both are equally bad for his ship and his survival rate.

He’s in the cockpit in seconds, the ship still quaking and the sensors stills screaming, and realizes, impossibly, that it’s the latter.

“Fuck,” Felix mutters, staring wide-eyed at the small prowler circling like a shark on his radar. He switches the ship’s controls from automatic to manual and buckles down as the ship is rocked by another shot. The monitor above him beeps, showing a quickly draining percentage and a lot of red: his shields are still up, but not for much longer.

He slams on the forward gas and the ship rockets forward.

About twenty minutes later, skin buzzing from the thrill of the firefight and irritated by the surprising amount of damage done to his ship, Felix blasts the prowler to pieces with his ship’s more than competent turrets. Thank God Mountbatten hadn’t skimped on defenses, Felix thinks as he picks through the wreckage, because he sure as hell hadn’t been expecting anything like this.

_I’ve gotten soft_, Felix thinks, grimacing as he examines the pieces of the exploded prowler as they float by his large cockpit window.

_Who the fuck,_ he also thinks, _just opens fire on a random personal vessel?_

Surprisingly, the destruction of the prowler answers, and a branded hunk of the exterior taps lightly against the glass before sliding out of view.

CHARON INDUSTRIES, a fractured logo reads in black, bolded letters, glinting briefly in the light of Felix’s ship.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Felix says to no one.

He assumes it’s a one-off. What are the odds? His former employer, the only one with any real beef with him, is locked away somewhere or, better yet, dead. Besides, there’s no reason why anyone from Felix’s past should be aware that Felix himself is still alive. He died, and there’s a paper trail to prove it. Felix fell from a great height and died upon impact. None of it makes logical sense. 

But the attacks keep coming.

And coming.

And coming.

It’s admirable, how determined his assailants are. It’s far less admirable and far more irritating that they keep damaging his ship, because Felix quickly learns that he absolutely hates fixing the shields. By the third attack, which occurs while he’s drifting through the airspace of a leisure planet called Furlough 7, Felix decides that if he has to climb into one more maintenance chute, he’s going to amputate his good leg and replace it with metal. Crawling through the things is killer on his flesh knee, and he’s fucking sick of hobbling around like he’s eighty years old.

Of course the fourth attack comes and goes and his leg stays intact, but he’s still sorely fucking tempted.

Instead of chopping off his leg, Felix ups his defenses. He spends an absolute shitton of money on a cloaking device for his ship’s radars, hoping it’ll mask whatever broadcast is being used to map his location. It doesn’t seem to work, because two days later he wakes to a red alert and a _broken _fucking_ shield._

He tries to dock for a few days on a nowhere planet, something uncolonized with defensible terrain and a breathable atmosphere. He thinks that maybe it’ll throw off his attackers, or at least pressure them into confronting him face to goddamn face. But no one lands to greet him, and after a week, he gets bored, or thinks, stupidly optimistic, that maybe he’s thrown his pursuers off his trail. Felix leaves the planet to find a ship waiting in ambush.

Afterwards, he fixes his shields, flies to the nearest weapons mechanic, and invests in better turrets.

—

He’s got a piece of the first prowler sitting in the cargo bay. He’d had the idea of snagging it just before it had the chance to drift off into space and become another anonymous piece of detritus, and within minutes he’d been tethered to his ship and breathing heavily in an ill-fitting set of power armor, holding a chunk of metal with edges sharp enough to _look_ dangerous.

Felix had dragged it into the cargo bay and thrown it in a corner. It’d been much heavier with gravity imitators on.

Now, he stands in front of it, arms crossed. The shiny black metal is covered in scorch marks, one edge clearly damaged by laser fire, and it’s a little dusty, but the words are still legible.

“Charon Industries,” Felix reads, and speaking the words aloud irritates him. He kicks the heavy hunk of ship and it scrapes a few sad inches across the floor.

He stares at it some more, standing there silently for longer than he’d ever willingly admit, just thinking. The attacks aren’t stopping, his once luxurious ship is becoming a drain on his resources, and it’s time to look for a solution that’s more long-term than just taking the hits as they come.

He needs to find the source, and he’s got it in front of him, spelled out plain as fucking day.

But he doesn’t know what to do with the information.

Once he realizes that he’s not accomplishing anything by standing stupidly in the cargo bay, he heads back to the cockpit. The stars greet him, quiet and unassuming; he collapses into the main control chair.

What would _Charon_ want with _him_, is the question. It seems weird to devote so much effort into killing Felix at this point; The Chorus Project is long over, he’s not harboring any sensitive information, and Hargrove is dead.

Unless, Felix thinks, spinning in the chair and staring at the plated ceiling. Unless.

He plants his foot and the chair snaps to stillness.

Unless.

Felix stares at the ceiling for another moment, squinting. In the next he smacks the nearby console to life. It boots up, blue light spilling from the active projectors.

He exhales, enters his password, and pulls up his contacts.

—

“How's the hip?”

Felix rolls his eyes.

“No different than the last time you asked.”

“I'm being _polite_.”

“You're being _evasive_.”

“Felix, I just —” Siris exhales, and the image of him projected onto the ship’s center console lifts a hand to scrub over his face. Felix must have caught him at a bad time — he's dressed in a shirt that looks suspiciously sleep-rumpled, and unless Felix’s eyes are fucking with him, he's got a few pillow creases scoured into his cheek. Not that Felix cares. As far as he's concerned, Siris can afford to lose a few hours. “You've gotta understand that this is crazy. Malcom Hargrove? C’mon, man. Pick an easier target.”

Felix wants to remind Siris of the myriad ops that they successfully ran against “impossible” targets. He also wants to tell him to fuck off. But, unfortunately, Felix is the one asking the favor, so instead of slapping his console’s off button he just rolls his eyes and tries not to make too many choking hand motions at his ex partner.

“So he _is_ alive, huh?” Felix says. ”Goddamn. Figured he’d be killed the second they took him in.”

Siris grimaces.

“Felix,” He says slowly. The way he speaks, like he's talking to one of his stupid kids, immediately taps into one of Felix’s biggest pet peeves. Not that Felix can do anything about it; as he keeps reminding himself, Siris isn't the one asking for a favor.

Whatever. If Felix knows how to do anything, it's stew in relative silence.

“The man is serving time on one of the UNSC’s most locked-down prison ships,” Siris is saying, as if Felix doesn't already know and also, for some reason, would care to know, “Literally the fucking _definition_ of maximum security. There is no way that you — or anyone — could even hope to get close _alone_. It's — it's _suicide_.”

“Sounds good to me,” Felix says, just to piss Siris off.

He misses the mark. Siris’s eyes go wide.

“You're insane.”

_Shit._

“No, hang on. Just hear me out,” Felix argues.

“No!” Siris interrupts. “I'm not helping you with this. If you want to kill yourself, do it on someone else’s time. I won't have your blood on my hands.”

Felix leans back in his chair, arms crossed. Onscreen, Siris steps back, visibly fuming as he turns away and rakes a hand through his hair.

But he hasn't hung up.

“Wu,” Felix says, taking the defensive. “He knows where I am, _obviously_, and I have no idea how, so I don’t know how to stop it. And you and I both know that if this _is_ him, he’s not gonna quit sending goons after me until one of us finally dies. And since he’s apparently all nice and cozy in — what did you call it? Oh, yeah! Fucking _super space Guantanamo_ —”

“You don't know that for sure,” Siris interrupts. “I can put some of my guys on it, find his moles and try to keep his orders from getting out. There's no reason why —”

“You can't be serious, man,” Felix groans.

Siris glares, jaw tight. Felix fumes and doesn't give an inch.

“There's no reason why,” Siris repeats, “this can’t be solved without spilling any more blood.”

“When your plan inevitably fails, I'm going to tell you I told you so. And until then, I’m going to keep on killing every single bastard unlucky enough to get sent after me,” Felix explains, exuding what he feels to be all the patience of a particularly homicidal saint. “Wu, _think_ about this. If I don't end this now, a lot of people might die. _Will_ die, because I’ll kill them. And _they_ won't be prisoners convicted of some of the worst crimes imaginable.”

Siris stares at Felix through the blue haze of the hologram, a pained look resting on his brow. Felix, suddenly feeling something distantly related to sympathy, shrugs.

“Not that I care who kicks it,” Felix adds, just for clarification. “But, if you ask me, blowing up a prison ship is pretty much always preferable to taking out droves of potentially not-quite-evil mercenaries. I mean, come on.”

Felix waves his hand back and forth between his own chest and the holographic approximation of Siris’.

“That was us, at some point.”

There's a long moment of silence. Felix, forever in disdain of quiet in general, nervously spins his chair in tiny arcs and scrapes his feet against the floor.

“Since when do you practice empathy?” Siris finally says, and it's so anticlimactic that Felix thinks he would punch him if he could.

“I try to do so as little as possible,” he says, reaching out to flick the hologram. It's an overall unsatisfying action, but the gesture is still made.

The holo warps briefly and then settles to reveal Siris turned away from Felix, the side of his face just barely visible in the pixelated blue light. The tight set to his shoulders and the way that he thumbs thoughtlesslyat his bottom lip sends Felix reeling against an alarming wave of déjà vu.

Siris is thinking. Hard.

“I need the ship blueprints, Wu,” Felix tries to coax, but it's a fight to keep the edge of desperation out of his voice. The only thing worse than letting Siris know how desperate he is is to actually show him how desperate he is.

“That's it,” Felix says. He flexes his fingers against the arm rests of his chair. “Just a way in.”

Siris shakes his head, but Felix doesn't think it's a “no.” It looks more like a “shut up, I'm thinking;” a type of expression that Felix is intimately familiar with. Fighting against his instincts that tell him to blow off the request and go full loquacious, Felix sits back and gives him a moment. This is more important than his pride.

Siris turns back around and looks promisingly determined. Felix straightens up.

“I'll cut you a deal, okay?” Siris says.

There goes his hope. Felix groans and slumps back in his chair. “I hate your shitty deals.”

“I know. But hear me out —” Siris grins like he's got the answers to all of Felix’s problems hidden in his pockets. It's especially annoying because Felix knows that he doesn't. In fact, the more that he has to look at Siris’s self-satisfied grin, the more he kind of wants to hang up the call and forget that this whole thing ever happened.

“Hear me out,” Siris says again, and he even pauses for effect. Felix has his hand on the End Call button. “We try my way first.”

It's worse than he expected. Felix drops his head into his hands and groans again. What a colossal waste of time. “Ugh -”

“We try my way first!” Siris insists, and the smug smile is now sickeningly earnest. Felix, unsurprisingly, finds the latter to be even worse. “If it fails, then I'll send you the ‘prints.”

“How fucking long is your way gonna take, Wu?” Felix snaps. “I don't love the idea of living in limbo for years while you play puppeteer with the prison system. In fact, that sounds like a terrible idea. I'd honestly rather blow my brains out.”

“What's the rush?” Siris asks, and he’s already started planning; Felix watches as he opens a new screen and swipes through several files. Ever the go-getter. “Besides, it wouldn't take years. Stop being overdramatic.”

“The fuck am I supposed to do while I wait for your stupid plan to fail?” Felix fumes. “Sit around with my thumbs up my ass?”

Siris selects a document and enlarges it. Felix tries to read it, but it's written in an unfamiliar alphabet. And backwards, for that matter. At least, he thinks it’s backwards. God, whatever.

Felix sighs and leans his elbow against the arm of his chair, lowering his head to rest his chin in his hand.

“You could finish tracking down those reds and blues that you were so keen on,” Siris offers. “Not that I'm advocating for pointless homicide. But it could keep you busy.”

Felix glances towards the post-it still taped to his console. He drums his fingers against his chin. It's not a terrible idea, all things considered, it's just that it's not a _new_ one. Not to mention that the more that Felix tries to think about his next move, the more he is forced to realize the emptiness behind it. He'll have to find Tucker, that much is certain — the bitch probably picked up his key, or will at least know who did. So he's got that plan locked down. But after that?

Why does he care about them? They didn't kill him. They made him miserable and drove him batshit crazy, but they didn't kill him. And while that may have been enough motivation for pre-fall Felix to go on a spree, now he finds it to be almost pathetic. Killing someone on the spot for being annoying is one thing. But hunting them to the end of the galaxy?

He's too tired for that. Too tired and too fucking shallow.

But he still _really_ wants that fucking key, so.

“I mean, come on,” Siris is saying as Felix resurfaces, “have you even looked into the coordinates I gave you? They could have moved on by now. In fact, I'm pretty positive that they have, since no one has been able to confidently report their whereabouts for —”

When Siris originally quit their partnership, Felix had thought, between the fury and the homicidal urges, that at least he'd never have to hear Siris’ nagging again. He's eating those words now. And maybe revisiting a few of those urges.

“I'm sorry, mother,” Felix interrupts, deadpan, “I was a little busy having a new hip installed.”

“If I'm your mother, I should be the one getting a hip replacement,” Siris corrects. Felix makes more strangling gesture with his hands that Siris gracefully ignores.

Siris types something into a window and sends it off with a flick of his finger. “There. I've just got to make a few calls, and then I'll have officially started my side of things, okay? I should hear back from my informants soon, and then I can start making progress.”

“I hate you,” Felix says, spinning lazy circles in his chair.

“You're welcome,” Siris offers. “Look, just — don’t die yet, okay? We can figure this out. Besides, you've still got prison time to serve.”

Felix flips him off.

“You bastard,” Siris mutters, and then, louder, “You owe me, Gates.”

“Bye,” Felix says, and hangs up the call.

— 

“Isaac —”

“I'm almost done. Hold still.”

Felix ties off the stitch in Locus’ brow, knotting it once, twice, three times. Locus passes him the clippers.

“How's it look?” He asks, hesitant, as Felix cuts the thread.

Felix snorts, tossing the clippers onto the table by his hip before smoothing his thumb over the bloody skin above the closed-up gash. It’s horizontal, right above the line of his eyebrow. ‘Bout an inch long.

“I think you'll live, ” he offers gravely, briefly rechecking the line of stitches. “But unfortunately I can't attest to the wellness of your brain cells. Pass me the towel.”

“Shut up,” Locus mutters, but a moment later he shoves the towel into Felix’s waiting hand. Felix folds it to a clean edge and dabs at the iodine smudges on Locus’s brow.

Locus cringes away from the gentle pressure.

“Still hurts that bad, huh?” Felix asks, lowering his hand and stepping back, fully expecting Locus to stand and shove past him like the ungrateful bastard that he is.

But instead, Locus just sighs.

“I'm fine,” he says, and leans forward, shoulders tight in a way that suggests he's fighting his own instincts in order to obey. His eyes are shut, head tipped back. “Go ahead.”

Felix shuffles his feet, feeling a bit like the floor was just yanked out from under him. The unsatisfied phantom discomfort of Locus knocking him aside makes his shoulder burn. He can handle angry, not-good-with-pain Locus— he doesn't know what to do with this version.

But Felix is a professional, goddamn it, and Locus is covered in blood and disinfectant. He dives back in.

But that doesn't mean he won't be a bitch about it.

“You're oddly docile today,” he teases, going back in with an admittedly gentler touch. He cradles Locus’s nape with his free hand, hoping it helps anchor Locus’s urge to jerk away. If not, oh well; at least this way Felix has a way to yank him down if he tries to get up. “What's on your mind, big guy?”

Locus grunts, lifting a hand to swat weakly at Felix.

“Hey, quit that shit,” Felix orders. “You'll make me tear your stitches. Do you _want_ a big-ass scar in your eyebrow —”

Beneath him, the moment that the word ”scar” passes Felix’s tongue, Locus tenses. Felix leans back again to better see his partner, tugging gently at the short hair beneath his hand to get Locus to open his eyes.

“Is that what's wrong?” He asks when Locus finally looks up at him. Felix grins, sure that Locus will scoff and prove him wrong. “You don't want your eyebrow to scar?”

Locus doesn't flinch, but Felix almost does, not expecting the brutal, abject silence that settles between them. Locus stares as if he has something to prove, eyes flickering back and forth between Felix’s like he's looking for something. Never one to back down from a challenge, Felix stares back.

But, for some reason, there's a lot more… _stuff_ swirling in the gray of Locus’s eyes than Felix expected to see. Something honest and soul-stripping that catches him totally off guard. It doesn't freak him out, no way, but Felix does break eye contact. He busies himself with wiping the bloody skin beneath Locus’s eye and tries to ignore the warmth threatening to rush to his cheeks.

“Since when do you care about scars?” Felix deflects, steering the conversation away from whatever precipice he's stumbled upon. In the moments that it takes for Locus to gather his wits, Felix brushes the back of his hand over Locus’s forehead.

“Scars are cool,” he says, admiring the brown, unmarred skin of Locus’ forehead.

It takes him a moment, but something about it suddenly feels wrong. Almost like something’s missing.

Felix’s eyes narrow, and he brushes his wrist over Locus’s forehead again, this time feeling like he has to fight against gravity just to lift his hand.

“Don't need any more,” Locus finally says. Felix blinks rapidly, ignoring a dizzying pulse of vertigo, and traces his fingertips over Locus’s forehead, the bridge of his nose; searching for something he now knows should be there, but isn't. “You've given me enough already.”

There's another pulse. Felix’s heartbeat feels sluggish, and he pulls away. He can't focus on Locus’s face. Something’s wrong.

“What?” Felix asks, everything in slow motion. “What do you —”

Felix blinks, and everything is suddenly awash in red. Clarity snaps into place, brutal and harsh like a slap to the face. He panics.

“Locus,” Felix snaps, anger rising to drown out the fear. It works for a second, but no more, and the fury melts into pleading. For what, Felix doesn't know. For something. “Locus, I don’t —”

“You drove me to this,” Locus says, and the X carved into his face is bloody and dripping. Felix grabs for the towel, but the little table and his kit are gone, replaced by a sucking blackness and a bleak, forgettable absence. His palms are hot; When he lifts his hands they, too, are covered in gore; the handle to his sword, blade extended and glowing, rests snugly in his right hand.

“Ah,” Felix stutters, “What —”

“It’s your fault. You did this, Felix,” Locus’s decapitated voice says. “Only you.”

And Felix looks up to find Locus’s face suddenly inches away from his; lips parted, eyes wide, and Felix’s sword buried deep between his ribs.

Felix inhales, choking on something like pain. Locus closes his eyes.

And Felix opens his.

—

The dim expanse of his bedroom ceiling greets him.

Everything is dark in space, but he's got a day-to-night cycle going that he set up during a fit of neurotypicalism, so the lack of false daylight means that, according to the cycle, he should still be asleep. Felix sits up on his elbows and squints at the LED numbers on his silent alarm clock: 04:26. He feels vindicated, but of absolutely nothing. Just feels good to be right about something, he guesses, even if that something is as stupid as knowing he's conscious when he shouldn't be.

Felix falls back against his mattress and sighs, flexing his hands in the sheets. They're sweat-slick, and for a brief moment he panics, remembering the warmth of Locus’ blood on his palms. But it's brief. Thankfully, his body gives him a break, probably just too tired for shit like panic right now. Still, every part of him buzzes with an exhausted adrenaline.

“Fuck,” he mutters, because he feels, at that moment, like it's an appropriate reaction. An appropriate descriptor for the feelings that are currently swirling like nausea behind his lungs.

So much fucking blood. It's almost like he can smell it.

“Fuck,” he says again. Normal Felix knows that he no longer cares about Locus’ well-being. Normal Felix knows that Locus is the world’s shittiest partner and the universe’s most gullible jackass. Normal Felix knows that sleep is for resting and forgetting, not anxiety attacks and _pining_.

_Christ_.

Dreaming Felix seems to have missed the memo.

He closes his eyes, but something pulses behind his eyelids with a gentle, insistent glow. It's too faint to be the overhead, but he opens his eyes and looks around anyways, on too much of a high-alert to not check out anything even slightly unusual.

The source is a small monitor set up on his nightstand; a tiny projector that he uses to scroll the internet and not much else. But it's blinking with a telltale notification sign, and it's not going to stop until it gets answered, so Felix groans, sits up, and throws his legs over the side of the bed.

“Fine,” he mutters, shakily hoisting the admittedly lightweight console into his lap. He's tired, dammit — everything is harder to do while tired.

Felix stands and heads out of his room, the door to the hall hissing as it swishes open and then closes behind him. The ship’s halls are their usual humming quiet, and Felix’s bare feet feel cold against the floor as he heads for the cockpit.

It’s a brief trip there, Felix already missing his bed as warmth leeches out of him through the soles of his feet. Outside the panoramic windows of the cockpit, the stars slowly pass by, the ship heading for coordinates that Felix programmed only a few days ago. He should be reaching Rigel Colony IV in a week or two, the location of the last known sighting of the reds and blues. Felix isn’t looking forward to it.

He tosses his monitor onto the center console and sits heavily into the pilot’s chair as it connects.

Felix types — or stabs with his pointer fingers, take your pick — his passcode into the entry screen, which quickly unlocks to display his recent messages. There aren't many. In fact, there's only one, blinking insistently front and center on the screen. There's no listed origin, but most things that happen to fall Felix’s way are untraceable. He likes them better that way.

With a heavy feeling settling over his limbs, something a little more foreboding than simple exhaustion, he opens the file titled SUPER GUANTANAMO and reads the note that greets him.

_Plan 2. I'll be in touch._

_Don't do anything stupid._

_-S_

Felix clicks to the next document. He squints at the sudden wash of bright light, eyes burning and officially irritated by the fact that he’s still awake, but he's shocked into full wakefulness the moment that he realizes just what it is he's looking at.

They're blueprints, his brain supplies. Blueprints of a prison ship.

Of Hargrove’s ship.

“Christ,” Felix breathes, and then, still not really believing what he's seeing — Siris fucking _pulled through_ — he says it again for good measure. “_Christ_.”

He clicks through the next few documents. At the sight of more maps and location details, all carefully planned out and annotated, something in him panics. His fingertips suddenly feel tingly and it's like he suddenly realizes what he's doing and what he's seeing and it all just feels like someone’s shoving cotton down his throat and —

He snaps his console shut.

It's too early for this shit.

—

A few hours later, his alarm clock beeps and the overheads slowly light up with buzzing, LED sunlight. Felix stares at them, bleary eyed and defeated, feeling like he's been run over multiple times by an eighteen-wheeler and then stabbed in the amygdala. He's got a behemoth of a headache and eyes that are burning with dryness and exhaustion. 

And it's time to get up and face the fucking music.

Besides, he reminds himself later — hair freshly cut, face smooth, new scar burning hot where it slices down his face — old plan temporarily benched as he plots a course for the nearby planet Alcra and carefully avoids looking at the printouts that litter the ship’s center console: besides.

He asked for this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That wraps up the prequel! During my editing I realized that I had to cut a lot out (hence the delay) and this chapter still ended up being way longer than expected! This was a big one for me, since it’s technically the first “interaction” between Felix and Locus, and the scene with Siris was the first thing that I wrote for this entire fic (it even predates sour milk)! Very exciting to share what I’ve technically been working on since 2018.
> 
> The final part to this trilogy is currently in progress! No idea when it’ll be finished, but I’m working on it! As always, my Twitter is @burytgdmori , feel free to come yell at me to hurry up! I’ll take encouragement in any form I can get. 
> 
> Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this fic, and thank you so so soooo much for reading this far! I appreciate each and every one of you ❤️ Special thanks to those who commented and left kudos on chapter one! You’re the best! I hope to see y’all again soon! 
> 
> Bye for now!


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